Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Public Accounts Committee
Section 38 - Agencies Remuneration
1:35 pm
Mr. Paul Kiely:
I will take some of that. We had an assistive technology and custom seating department within the clinic. A lot of assessments would be done on children with physical disabilities for their seating requirement and recommendations would be made for the purchase of specialised seating for certain clients. That seating would then be purchased on the market.
A business case was brought by one of the senior managers to cut out the middle man and that we would set up a company to supply specialised seating and, hopefully, make a profit and create an income stream. A business case was made for it, the company was set up, it started trading, and the recession hit and orders collapsed. They tried to trade their way out of it and when I was leaving the organisation in June, they were putting together a proposal for its future as to whether it could trade out of the difficulties it was in or would be put for sale.