Mr. Hamilton Goulding:

Chairman, members and staff of the committee, I have come here because of my lifelong attachment to and concern for the CRC. I wish it to be recognised that I am here voluntarily in a spirit of co-operation in the hope of supplying honest answers to questions raised and, above all, enabling the clinic to fully restore its function and reputation. I must state also that the former board is no longer an entity but a group of private individuals. Accordingly, it must be clear that anything that I say here today is an account of my own personal opinions, observations and actions. I am not representing other former members, nor speaking on their behalf.
The CRC is a great organisation. It has been providing world-class services to disabled people for 63 years and should be recognised as a great success story. It has an extraordinary skilled, dedicated, hard-working and compassionate staff, as well as extraordinary clients, children, parents and families who also contribute so much themselves to the success of the clinic. There is a new board in place now, as well as a chief executive officer, well qualified and generous people who will give their time freely, as did the former board, to bring the clinic forward to new and great achievements. I ask everyone, politicians, the media and the public, to support them and help the CRC in every way to return to the excellence and dignity that it has for so long enjoyed. This must be our foremost objective.
CRC has been a presence in my life since my earliest memories. My mother, Lady Valerie Goulding, founded it when I was four years old and ran it on a full-time voluntary basis for its first 30 years. I first shook a collection box for CRC from the age of 15 and did so on various streets in many towns across the country. Due to these personal and family connections, the difficulties and damage of the past year leave me with a feeling of deep sadness and regret. I must mention again something that seems to be widely ignored or perhaps disbelieved. We took neither pay nor expenses of any kind in connection with CRC. The governors were volunteers, receiving no material benefit whatsoever themselves. We have incurred considerable expenses ourselves and contributed to numerous fund-raising ventures, not ever claiming anything back. I state again this only to reinforce the fact there is no motive, no incentive and no benefit for any director to see anyone in the CRC receive excessive payments. It would have been perfect for the board if all staff were to be paid by the same approved scales.
With a few exceptions, I generally welcome Mr. Cregan’s report. It positively and unambiguously exonerates the board from the major accusations that have been raised. It finds there was no wrongdoing and no need for further investigation, which slightly makes me wonder why we are here. There was sound financial control, as well as robust and sound control of credit card use. The standard of record and file keeping was good. The audited accounts of CRC and Friends and Supporters of the Central Remedial Clinic were accessible and transparent. The care trust had built up an infrastructure that contributed significant funds for the benefit of CRC. Employee contracts could not be unilaterally broken without significant risk. Management salaries were fully declared to the HSE as late as May 2012. Service arrangement obligations were met. There was co-operation in forming the new board.
There is one item, however, which I view as seriously and damagingly incorrect, namely the allegation that the company had then been virtually abandoned by all its previous governors, company secretary and chief executive officer. It is clear that Mr. Cregan has not received a full understanding of the events that led to the board’s departure and the popular perception that the board, having decided it had done something wrong, had run away. Senior people in the HSE will know in fact the board was effectively dismissed at a few hours’ notice. At a meeting in HSE headquarters on 13 December 2013, the then chairman was informed that unless all the board resigned forthwith, HSE funding would be withdrawn from the clinic. The resignations were tendered directly because the board’s position was untenable, its primary concern being not to allow any impediment to the continued funding by the HSE of the CRC, which would effectively shut down the clinic. This subsequently put the legal status of the HSE’s running of the clinic into dubious legal territory. To sort this out, it had to request myself and others to facilitate this which was willingly given in the clinic’s interest.
The Cregan report identifies an issue I believe to be at the heart of the problems raised:

It should have been clear to the CRC from 2009 that the environment in which it operated had changed significantly and the maintenance of an attitude of provider independence could not prevail in the long run.

The board was very concerned about independence. CRC is not a branch of the HSE. Board members did have a strong culture of independence. There was a justifiable feeling that the exercise of this independence was the key to much of the CRC’s success over 63 years. My mother, the founder, was not known for bending to other people’s rules. Perhaps, as it goes back a long way, that is the origin of some of these problems. We wished to exercise provider independence only to achieve two primary goals, namely the continued provision of excellent disability services, along with the ability to expand them further, as well as the achievement of this in a cost-efficient manner. However, on reflection, it is judicious to admit to having pushed this independence too far in light of acknowledged and written commitments to the HSE. More determined co-operation from both parties should have alleviated this situation.
High executive pay was a real difficulty. I believe most of the current difficulties arose essentially from the legacy of climbing down from the apparent economic boom of the early years of the century and the difficulty of one body, the HSE, funding a job whose contract of employment is with a different body, the CRC. Mr. Tony O’Brien, director general of the HSE, stated everyone must understand that all employees in section 38 organisations should be considered as government employees. He may understand it but I, and the rest of us, find that hard because normally an employee is an employee of the company with whom they have a contract of employment.

This is one of the difficulties. I will give a brief account of how these salary arrangements arose. Prior to 2009, all management salaries, including that of the CEO, were declared by the CRC and fully funded by HSE. In 2009, the HSE announced that it was introducing new consolidated scales for senior management. These resulting benchmarking levels were substantially below some rates already being paid. It was agreed at a meeting with the HSE in June 2009 that the clinic would independently pay the outstanding difference to those receiving salaries above the sanctioned rate - what are wrongly referred to as "top-ups". That expression is difficult because it suggests that-----