Sorry, Barry. Just because you shout "NOT" won't make a corporation into a government. For the record, you're leaving out an important word. It's a "non-profit," you say. A non-profit what? It's a non-profit corporation.

Comhaltas has a six-tiered governing structure (individual members, branch committees, county-region boards, provincial boards, ardchomairle, and finally the high officers of the ardchomairle). This ensures that very few individual members have actually voted for any member of the ardchomairle. This makes it difficult to cause a change in the high officers of the organization through a broad grassroots movement, because only members of their own branches vote for them directly. But you err if you assume that this is somehow illegal or outrageous. Plenty of non-profit corporations have far less in the way of democracy.

I've worked most of my working life for non-profit corporations that "take public money." This does not make them democracies in which "the public" that provided the money has a direct role. (They don't hold public elections on who runs the Red Cross.) A lot of people seem not to understand this. If you are not vested in the organization by being a member, your only say would be to call your governmental representative and say "please don't fund so-and-so." But your governmental rep is insulated from that decision anyway; typically in the arts, the money goes through an arts board or arts council before an organization like Comhaltas gets it, and their decisions on which organizations to fund are subject to pretty rigorous oversight. In particular, they will put together a truly independent panel of arts experts to vet the various applications. I have served on many grants panels making this kind of decision; they include artists, administrators, and scholars in relevant disciplines. By the time a grant is made, everyone's ass is pretty well covered, and it would be hard for a member of the public to argue from sensationalized news accounts that an organization isn't worthy of the money that an expert panel awarded it.

I'm sure most arts experts, looking at the totality of Comhaltas's activities, and being aware of the controversy over this one decision, would still not vote to de-fund Comhaltas. And I believe that members of all the other branches would agree.

Beyond denying it funding, there is generally no mechanism for the government to interfere in a non-profit corporation's business.

Corporations are also not democracies internally, although comhaltas itself is structured on semi-democratic principles. They are governed only by their own bylaws, generally established by the founding board of directors and modified by subsequent boards when necessary. If these bylaws give individual members no power at all in guiding the organization, then that's the way it is, and that's perfectly legal. (Members knew what rights they had before joining, so it's hard to argue that anyone has been wronged.) Many non-profits don't even HAVE individual members of any kind, and board members are simply selected by the board itself.

Comhaltas happens to be MORE democratic than many other non-profits, but you still shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that it's "a democracy." To be governed by a convoluted, semi-democratic system such as Comhaltas has developed is probably fully legal (I'm in the US, not Ireland, so I don't know for sure.) We can sputter about it all we like, but it's not "a democracy," and it won't respond to our outrage.