Follow Mr Flannery’s example, Ms Kerins

FRANK may hope that, by resigning from the board of Rehab, he has got himself off the hook. How successful that strategem ultimately proves remains to be seen; certainly, the Public Accounts Committee still believes that Mr Flannery has questions to answer.

However, what none of us – least of all the members of the PAC – should forget is that the fundamental issue at the heart of the Rehab controversy is not in fact Mr Flannery. It is Angela Kerins and her stewardship of the organisation. There are now at least five separate dimensions to what started off as a simmering standoff but which has long since become an ugly boil on the face of the body public.

They are: Ms Kerins’s enormous salary; her refusal to accept the need for transparency and accountability on behalf of a taxpayer-funded body; her husband’s business links to Rehab; the ruthless sacking two years ago of 15 disabled workers in Galway; and the minuscule amount of money raised from Rehab scratch cards that actually goes towards charitable work.

Rehab, and in particular Ms Kerins herself, have utterly and shamefully failed to satisfactorily address any of these issues. And, as a result, this controversy is not going to go away – and Rehab’s reputation in the eyes of the public at large will continue to be diminished.

If truth be told, rather than lancing the boil, the fact that Mr Flannery has had to go will only increase the belief that Ms Kerins’s own position is increasingly untenable. Rehab now finds itself in the same reputational quagmire that the CRC did.

Indeed, so much damage has now been done to Rehab’s reputation, and its ability to continue the important work it does has been compromised to such an extent, that it might well be best for everybody involved if she simply took a leaf out of Mr Flannery’s book and resigned herself.