Just to clarify my own position, I'm not really defending Comhaltas. It's just that each new development in the story, such as Labhras refusing mediation, is trumpeted on this list as fresh evidence of wrongdoing, when it actually proves nothing either way. And weird innuendoes are made about comhaltas's "not-for-profit" status involving what is really a question of budgets, not of profiteering.

For the record, there is no legal or broadly-accepted distinction between a nonprofit organization and a not-for-profit one. In general, these are two terms for the same thing...some people prefer one term and some the other. It is perfectly acceptable and even desirable for a non-profit or not-for-profit to accumulate funds to carry over from year to year, thus technically operating at a profit. If they don't do this, they become extremely vulnerable at the turn of the fiscal year if a grant or other revenue stream falls through. One organization I used to work for had to lay everyone off and re-hire them two months later!

Jim, getting millions of government euros doesn't constitute profit, nor is it "stretching" the not-for-profit distinction. If the organization spends that money to meet its goals, and even if it invests money to spend on its goals next year (thus operating at a profit for a given year), it generally doesn't break the rules. Nor is paying the staff of an organization a salary considered profit.

The distinction (if anyone is interested) is that the money brought in by a not-for-profit organization cannot be distributed among shareholders, owners or officers. It is held by the corporation and must be spent in the advancement the corporation's goals. Staff members may earn set salaries, but they may not share in profits, as in a for-profit company. This allows an organization like Comhaltas to accumulate money for several years before starting a project like the Clasac centre.

Once again, it is possible to make assumptions based on the name "not-for-profit," and try to make the perfectly routine operation of such an organization sound sinister. It's possible to make it sound like an organization is profiteering because it receives "millions" in grants. But the figures quoted above are really not a huge amount of money in the arts world, and they're small in overall government budgets. They seem big for trad arts, certainly, but there are organizations doing classical music with a far greater budget.

As for Jim's suggestion that I didn't mention "music" enough in my last post, in fact what I spoke of were "arts," and I mentioned that this was about "arts" management and "arts" centres and "arts" organizations many times in my post. Although comhaltas's name mentions musicians, it is devoted not only to music but to dance and language arts as well. It is a classic arts organization, shares similar goals with other arts organizations, and is governed by the same rules that govern others. Those rules allow it to accumulate money for multi-year projects, pay staff, and top up pension plans without violating its not-for-profit status.