Tánaiste pledges ’transparency and compliance’ in new agency pay obligations

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has insisted there will be "transparency and compliance" in public pay policy for State-funded agencies and charities.

As crisis continues around the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) charity over payments to senior executives from donations, Mr Gilmore told the Dáil that State-funded agencies would be required to sign a compliance statement annually on pay policy.

He warned that if an agency could not sign those compliance agreements “there are consequences” in terms of public funding that will go to salary payments.

“The act is being cleaned up here,” he told Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath, and assured him that the Charities Act, passed in 2009 to regulate such issues, would be commenced early next year.

Mr McGrath said the saddest part of all this was that the children and adults who relied on the services of the CRC would potentially suffer as public donations inevitably fall of.

If people were to continue to contribute as generously as they had to charity then “they need to be assured that their hard-earned money is spent on those for whom it is intended”.

Mr Gilmore stressed the public “can have confidence that when they donate their money, they know where their money is going and that there is transparency in respect of the administration, the management and the payment of senior executives in such organisations”.

During exchanges at Leaders’ Questions, Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald claimed the Government was putting sole responsibility on the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) and the HSE for dealing with the controversy. She suggested the Government was ambivalent about top-up payments.

“After all Tánaiste, your own record isn’t terribly good on that matter,” she said in reference to the breaking of a pay cap for Government advisers.

She queried what the Minister for Health was doing when the HSE was effectively being told to “get lost” by State-funded organisations exceeding the pay cap. Mr McGrath pointed to the 24 agencies, more than half of the 44 contacted by the HSE, which stated that they did not comply with public sector pay policy. “A further eight did not even bother to reply to the HSE,” he said.

The Cork South Central TD asked about another 2,000 agencies which receive substantial funding from the HSE. “How do we know what’s going on within these organisations?”

Mr Gilmore said the director general of the HSE met the chairpersons of all so-called section 38 organisations – 16 acute voluntary hospitals and 25 non-acute agencies. The focus was on the obligation on the board of each agency to strengthen governance standards and the requirement for the chairperson and another board director to sign a compliance statement on behalf of the organisation.