A cycle of denial and poor political over sight that few challenge
IT IS no secret that the voluntary disability sector has never been adequately funded.
‘It’s generally known that in this country there has been poor support for the intellectually disabled,’ Janet French told the Irish Mail on Sunday in an interview last year.
Ms French was formerly a board member of Sunbeam House Services, under whose care her sister died of Covid. Sunbeam is one of the many HSE-funded agencies in deficit, listed in the confidential 2018 briefing prepared for then-Health Minister Simon Harris.
Ms French previously spoke of how the entire intellectual disability sector suffers from what she calls an ‘insufficient commitment to maintaining sufficient resources’.
She said: ‘For many years, resources have been stretched to meet the increasing healthcare needs of the vulnerable as their expected lifespans continue to increase.
‘Yet this cycle of denial continues from successive governments, from the HSE and from the
management of the Section 38 charitable organisations involved.’
Ms French says the result is often ‘poor management of funds, limited acceptance of responsibility and a general expectation that frontline staff should soldier on at the coalface despite obvious limitations’.
Having left the Sunbeam board, Ms French can now freely speak her mind whereas none of the half dozen agencies contacted by the MoS this week were prepared to comment publicly on the funding crisis engulfing the disability accommodation centre.
HSE bosses have never established sufficient financial monitoring of the agencies they pay billions to annually, according to repeated reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General into HSE funding of the sector.
Most years, the C&AG routinely draws attention to ‘instances of inadequate monitoring and oversight by the HSE of grants to
outside agencies’ when it audits the agencies’ annual accounts.
And this has seen scandal after scandal in the sector and millions of euro foregone in pay top-ups to managers and other controversies.
The St John of God Group has previously been the focus of investigations by this newspaper which revealed bosses lied to the HSE about millions in top-ups secretly paid to managers against its own renumeration rules. But the real scandal is that any funds mis-spent in this way came from a pool of money that was already too small to fund services for clients.
Thanks to whistleblower Shane Corr, we know the Government’s failure to consider that complying with Hiqa regulations would need to be funded, has made a bad situation much worse.
This point was central to the message the HSE was trying to get across to Government in its confidential December 2018 briefing. But it’s not as if others had not already made this clear.
In October 2018 an independent review group, set up by the Government, said: ‘Hiqa is not required to take the financial capacity of inspected organisations into account in making its recommendations and has no power to provide funding to implement its recommendations.’