“It’s very frustrating”- issues for groups opening bank accounts

Sister Sheds are places where women can come together, and where they hopefully empower each other and provide support for one another. The aims are basically about making a positive difference in the community, but the Walkinstown version has been hampered by bureaucracy; something that community groups around Ireland are becoming familiar with.

“We’ve been working on it for a year, going on two years, and still no joy,” says spokesperson Yvonne Traynor, of the long running efforts to open a bank account.

The group is very active, but what they can offer is limited because the lack of a bank account makes it impossible to get grants that would be otherwise available.

“We have gone away, we have done voluntary things, we could do bingo, we could do bowling, we could have someone in to talk about self-defence. We pay an amount of money every week, it covers teas etc, and we save it up. But because we haven’t a bank account, we haven’t been able to get grants or anything at all,” says Yvonne.

“The first year we were up and running there were three signatories required, and it went as far as Compliance. I’m a former bank official so I would know a fair bit about opening up a basic bank account and things like that. I also worked in merchant banking so I know quite a bit about Compliance as well. Our chairperson who was to be a signatory on the account died very suddenly, which was very traumatic for us all. We had been in the middle of applying for an account, but when she died instead of them changing the paperwork, we were sent back to the bottom of the pile again.

“We’re now in the middle of it, this one, that one, the other one needs to sign. It’s absolutely ridiculous considering we are a group of women who literally want to store our funds. We’re two years up and running and we still have no bank account,” says Yvonne, clearly exasperated with the situation.

The offering would be significantly better if they could get grants, she says, while they know from other Sister Sheds what would be possible if they could open an account and thereby access grants.

“We hear what they have done, and what we cannot do, and it’s very frustrating. Everything we have done is through our own effort and some of us are out of pocket because of it.”

More bureaucratic

Andrew O’Byrne of Moyross Youth Academy said that while they enjoy a very good relationship with their own bank, they are aware of how onerous things have become.

“We’re now a CLG, a company limited by guarantee. That change happened with the Companies Registration, a name change from ‘company limited’ to CLG, but we didn’t change it with the bank, because we didn’t need to. But then when we tried to open a new bank account we had to change all of the accounts because of the name change. All the paperwork had to be redone, and by the time we had done that, the paperwork had changed for opening a bank account, so the original forms we had filled out had to be changed.”

In general, Andrew feels that society has become “a lot more bureaucratic” than was once the case.

“It’s not just banks, it’s everything. We’re lucky we have a voluntary board and we got professional support when we needed it.
“We registered to become a charity and there was quite a lot of work in that. It all takes time and effort, and it’s not the type of thing someone signs up to when they want to help out a charity; next thing you find yourself sitting in on webinars and going through all these money laundering, assets and identification pieces so that you can be a signatory on a bank account.”

Volunteers are kept overly busy just trying to deal with protocol, let alone the voluntary work they want to do, he feels.

“There’s a charities regulator, a charities governance code, and there’s a huge amount of work involved with that, on top of doing what it was you set out to do. The days of somebody saying ‘I’ve an hour a week to give you’, or ‘I’ll do a Tuesday evening or a Thursday afternoon’; it’s become a bit more complex now.”

Unreasonable to volunteers

Cillian O’Donoghue of the Community Development Team at Dublin South City Partnership said he has seen groups have more and more issues with banking.

 

“Over the past year and a half, it has definitely become more apparent with a specific cohort of groups that we work with. We work with loads of different community groups: sports clubs, youth services, all kinds of community groups – but the stuff around governance requirements and having a bank account is affecting more informal and smaller community groups like an active retirement group, older ladies who meet up for bingo once or twice a week, men’s sheds, things like that.”

There are far more hoops they must jump through to access funding, he feels, and that is especially true for older people, who may not be as digitally literate.

The level of inconvenience being put on volunteers is unreasonable, he feels.

“We’re trying to help these groups, to get them a few quid and you’re held back sometimes by the governance requirements of the funders. I do get that the likes of the Councils and Pobal are big organisations dealing with a lot of money and they want to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent. But the flip side of that is the groups on the ground might struggle to get the money, which 10 or 15 years they would have got fairly handily. It meant they could run an event, or get refreshments for an event, or pay rent for a hall. It’s harder than it should be for them to access funding.”