By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor
A PROMINENT charity boss secured an extra salary allowance at a time when her colleagues endured pay cuts.
Barbara O’Connell, who sits on the board of the Charities Regulatory Authority, received the payments in her capacity as the CEO of Acquired Brain Injury Ireland (ABI Ireland), which is almost entirely funded by the HSE.
ABI Ireland provides rehabilitation to over 1,200 HSE clients who live with an acquired brain injury.
Allowance sanctioned just as staff wages cut.
The extra €10,000 annual allowance given to Mrs O’Connell since 2010 was sanctioned just as the wages of staff at ABI Ireland were cut by an average of 6% in line with public sector pay policy.
Last night, Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman Seán Fleming said Mrs O’Connell’s allowance would be added to PAC’s ongoing investigation of the controversial secret payouts to managers at the St John of God group, which was exposed by this newspaper in June.
The HSE has also said it is ‘involved in an ongoing financial review’ of ABI Ireland which is ‘paying particular attention… to the management/admin and back office supports of the organisation.’
Payroll data provided to the Irish Mail on Sunday by a whistleblower shows that Mrs O’Connell’s salary in 2009 was €116,541 – the equivalent pay of a top-of-the scale HSE Local Health Office Manager.
Because of the level of State funding it receives, ABI Ireland follows HSE pay grades and complies with public sector pay scales.
This meant Mrs O’Connell was facing a €10,000 salary drop in February 2009 when the Government passed legislation to reduce all public sector wages.
But just weeks before the pay cuts were about to take effect, the remuneration committee and board of ABI Ireland agreed the new €10,000 allowance for Mrs O’Connell. They also agreed to backdate it to July 2009.
Mrs O’Connell told the Irish Mail on Sunday this week that the allowance was not a top-up.
“Allowance was not a top-up” – Mrs O’Connell.
However the net effect of the board decision was that instead of dropping in line with all other staff salaries, Mrs O’Connell’s gross pay packet was completely unaffected from the pay cuts that began in January 2010.
In fact her pay packet increased slightly to €117,387, a rise of more than €800.
At the same time, Mrs O’Connell repeatedly assured staff that she was being paid according to HSE pay scales and that no top-ups were being paid at ABI Ireland.
On December 16, 2013, for example, against the backdrop of media coverage of top-ups at the Central Remedial Clinic and Rehab charities, she emailed staff saying, ‘Acquired Brain Injury Ireland do not top up the salary of any member of staff in the organisation.’
That message was also repeated elsewhere.
ABI Ireland told the MoS this week that the extra allowance sanctioned for Mrs O’Connell was to compensate her for her role with the Anvers Housing Association, a social housing body that comes under the auspices of ABI Ireland.
Anvers Housing Association – which has always been based at and administered from ABI Ireland HQ by various staff members including Mrs O’Connell – manages residential accommodation for ABI Ireland clients. Both Mrs O’Connell and her husband are directors of the Anvers Housing Association. The audited accounts for the association have always stated that ‘none of the directors received any fees or other emoluments from the company’.
However, Mrs O’Connell has to date received more than €80,000 since 2010 in extra allowances related to the administration of the Anvers Housing Association.
Last night ABI Ireland said it had ‘always acted in the best interests of its clients’ and ‘had always been transparent in its operations’.
‘Any suggestion that the CEO was paid a “top-up” is false, nor did the CEO remuneration package contravene public sector pay policy,’ a statement said.
Wrong salary figure declared.
Anyone seeking to check Mrs O’Connell’s salary via publicly filed accounts for ABI Ireland would, until recently, have found the wrong figure declared. Before 2013, the charity did not include the salary of the CEO in its annual accounts and when it was first included – in accounts made public in August 2014 – the salary was incorrectly stated as €97,387, €20,000 less than the actual sum of the salary and extra allowance paid to Mrs O’Connell This error was corrected in the 2014 accounts which stated the correct total salary of €117,387 but made no reference to how this was made up.
At the same time ABI Ireland was facing into a difficult period of funding cuts and a consequent reduction in services.
While the charity posted a €35,000 surplus in 2012 it is now carrying a loss of more than €1m and several staff have been let go.
ABI Ireland said Mrs O’Connell’s salary ‘had been disclosed in service level agreements signed with the HSE’ but did not specify whether the HSE had been informed about the extra allowance being paid to Mrs O’Connell.
The ABI Ireland statement said Mrs O’Connell’s salary was ‘made up of separate and bona-fide salaries for her role as CEO of ABI Ireland and her role providing services on behalf of the Anvers Housing Association’.
According to ABI Ireland, this arrangement which was first agreed in December 2009 was later ‘formalised with a service level agreement between ABI Ireland and Anvers Housing Association’ in 2014.
Allowance not disclosed in public accounts.
However, the existence of the Anvers element of Mrs O’Connell’s salary has never been isolated and disclosed in any publicly available accounts although the Anvers accounts do state that unspecified administrative fees are paid to ABI Ireland. Until now Mrs O’Connell has never clarified that while her main salary has been compliant with HSE pay scales and was reduced in 2010, her take-home pay is being augmented by an extra allowance that has completely negated the pay cut.
In addition to being a board member of the Government’s charity watchdog since 2014, Mrs O’Connell is also vice-chairwoman of the Disability Federation of Ireland and was, until recently, a director of The Wheel, a charity that promotes good governance and transparency in the not-for-profit sector.
Mrs O’Connell’s husband, Maurice O’Connell, is a former CEO of the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and has been an ABI Ireland board member since 2010 – something staff say makes it difficult to raise issues related to the CEO.
Last night, Seán Fleming of Fianna Fáil, who is chairman of the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee, said that in his view the ‘top-up’ payments were unfair to those whose real take-home pay had been reduced.
‘The reality and the substance of the issue is she is still being paid what she was being paid and she needs to clarify how she can justify her previous statement that she took a pay cut,’ he said.
‘The board needs to answer why they approved it because they knew the Government guidelines and the HSE has to answer if they knew about it,’ he said. According to the website of ABI Ireland, Mrs O’Connell has served as chief executive of the organisation for 13 years.
She previously worked as an occupational therapy manager in Ireland’s National Rehabilitation Hospital.
‘Across her career she has worked with clients and staff in adult and adolescent psychiatry and intellectual disability,’ the website states.
Mrs O’Connell has an MBA in healthcare and business from UCD’s Smurfit Business School.
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