State also failed in its duty of care - Autism support
A mature, well-managed organisation needs to know its limits, to set and, if necessary, re-position its priorities and to communicate at all times what is going on behind its logos and slogans. That goes doubly for an organisation that relies entirely on public donations to keep it afloat.
Clearly, IAA has failed on some of those fronts. It did not hide its financial troubles — its last set of annual returns filed last month spelt out the difficulties and its auditors stated in the same documents that there were doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern.
However, the auditors made those remarks nine months ago and IAA’s failure to make widely known its situation in the meantime — and to explain how it got there — has led to doubts in the public mind about whether it should even be allowed to continue as a going concern.
Public confidence in charities has taken a hit in recent times and the Console debacle has made many rethink the destination for the loose coins in their pocket.
It does not help that another autism charity, the Irish Society for Autism, had to hand over the running of its three residential units to the HSE in recent months after repeatedly being found in breach of care and safety standards.
The timing of these incidents may be unfortunate for IAA in that its difficulties have come to light while the tarring brush is still in action, but it placed all the greater burden on its management to be as upfront as possible about its own operations.
It should not have taken a group of mothers to summon the charity to a meeting to get answers.
However, on another level, this is not a story about an individual organisation, but about the shameful way in which parents such as those mothers are left to rely on charity to obtain vital support and services for their children.
When IAA was established in 2001, one of its first aims was to help point parents in the right direction when they needed help.
Services were so sparse, so scattered, so disjointed, and so hard to find and fight for, that parents trying to get a diagnosis for their child, or left shell-shocked by such a diagnosis, had no single point of reference to turn to for assistance.
Fifteen years later, little has changed.
Parents of children on the autism spectrum must navigate layers of bureaucracy in a myriad government departments, State agencies and public, private, and outsourced services that possess a remarkable inability to communicate with each other.
Certainly, IAA deserves scrutiny and must accept any criticism that results. But that should not be allowed to deflect from the fact that the State has long abdicated its responsibility for its most vulnerable children by treating them as charity cases with sad stories instead of citizens with rights.
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