The Console scandal is utterly appalling... so why isn’t our new Charities Regulator all over it like a rash?

OF all the bizarre details to emerge about Paul Kelly, since he resigned as head of the suicide charity Console amid deep controversy last week, this one almost passed under the radar. One day in 1991, an acquaintance of Kelly’s bumped into him on Grafton Street. This man, a former parliamentary assistant called Tommy Morris, had known Kelly as a member of a religious youth group in Ballyfermot and later as a priest, offering counselling services in Inchicore. Unknown to Mr Morris, however, Paul Kelly had had even more strings to his bow in that period.

In 1982 he’d presented himself in Baggot Street Hospital, in reply to an advert looking for a locum doctor. He was interviewed for the post, managed to convince hospital management that he was a graduate of Trinity College, and got the job. He worked in the hospital for a full three weeks before he was rumbled.

Deception

In fact, rather than a trained and experienced doctor, Kelly was an unemployed 25year-old who had never set foot inside a medical college. The following year he was convicted of the deception, and given the benefit of the Probation Act.

On this particular day in 1991, though, Kelly wasn’t a ‘priest’, or a ‘doctor’, or a ‘counsellor’. This time, to Mr Morris’s bewilderment, he was an ‘Aer Lingus pilot’, walking down Grafton Street in full uniform.

Just why a priest, counsellor and fake doctor was then togged out as an airline pilot is probably best left in the realms of speculation, but, last Thursday, Paul Kelly could safely have added ‘escape artist’ to his repertoire of identities. If it hadn’t been for the shock result of the Brexit vote emerging in the small hours of Friday morning, that day’s headlines would have been dominated by Paul Kelly.

Just minutes before the airing of a Prime Time Investigations Unit probe into his running of Console, the charity he founded in 2002, Kelly, his wife Patricia and his sister Joan McKenna all resigned as directors of Console, which provides counselling services to those bereaved by suicide.

The programme had revealed the HSE is currently investigating irregularities in the charity’s finances, and the amounts under scrutiny may be as much as €500,000. Kelly has already been questioned by the HSE over purchases of items including groceries, clothes and flowers billed to the charity’s credit cards. There are also question marks over a trip he and another family member – also on the Console board – made to Australia and New Zealand, and over the use of two cars, a Mercedes and an Audi, purportedly acquired for the benefit of the charity.

The breaches of good governance within Console, as revealed by RTÉ, are staggering. Supplying a list of its board members to the HSE, which has given Console some €3.4million of public funds in total, Kelly claimed that they included then senator Jillian van Turnhout. Yet, short of once tweeting its helpline number, Ms van Turnhout has never had any connection with Console. Various different versions of audited accounts were submitted to different Government agencies, including Pobal and the Department of Foreign Affairs, in pursuit of public funds and grants, and were generally doctored to conceal payments to directors, totalling over €200,000, which are prohibited by law. Kelly himself received ‘consultancy fees’ from the charity totalling €171,594 in two years.

And the Console directors appear to have gone to some lengths to conceal the fact that several family members constitute its board – again in contravention of Charity Act regulations. His wife Patricia uses her maiden name of Dowling on official documents, and various different dates of birth have been recorded for Kelly, his wife and two other family members.

In the nine-year period up to 2014, Console has brought in some €12million in funding, of which one third came from the State and the rest from coffee mornings, fun runs, flag day collections and all the usual means by which the public donate to those charities that touch them.

Memory

And of all the causes that a fake doctor, former priest – and, for all we know, sometime ‘airline pilot’ – could choose to best tug at the heartstrings of the Irish public, suicide is one that is guaranteed a generous response. More young Irish men die from suicide than from road accidents and cancer combined, and we have the second highest rate in the EU of suicide in males under the age of 25. There is hardly a household in the country that has not been affected by the suicide of a member, a neighbour or a friend. Kelly himself lost a 23-year-old sister to suicide in 1995 and it was that, he claimed, that prompted him to set up the charity in her memory.

Previously, however, he had ventured into the charitable sector, in the counselling field, and has something of a history of claiming to have secured prestigious individuals to serve on his boards, without actually asking them first. When Bertie Ahern was Minister for Finance, back in the early 1990s, he discovered that a charity called the Christian Development Services was attempting to raise funds using his name as a trustee. The head of the charity was a Reverend Paul Kelly OSD, the Order of San Damiano. As it turned out, ‘Reverend’ Paul Kelly was also the only member of the Order of San Damiano, a new religion he was attempting to establish having been ‘ordained’ in 1988 by Bishop Michael Cox, who later ‘ordained’ Sinéad O’Connor. In other fundraising documents, ‘Rev Kelly’, or ‘Brother Kelly’, tagged himself ‘SP’, or Servants of the Poor, another religious order which didn’t appear to boast any other devotees.

But Kelly’s greatest success, to date, seems to have been with Console. Even after the HSE became concerned about internal practices in Console, a spokeswoman told RTÉ last week, it actually increased funding to the charity because the counselling service it provides – the value of which is not in question – was considered irreplaceable at the time.

Concerns

The helpline needed to be maintained, she explained, and allowing it to collapse was simply not an option, but it was made clear to Kelly that the funding came subject to a comprehensive review. Its internal audit ran to 229 pages and came up with 89 recommendations.

And yet it was not until an RTÉ investigation was carried out that the public, still willingly donating to Console, was alerted to any concerns about its governance.

The charitable sector has taken a deserved and dismaying hammering in the public perception over the past few years, and the reluctance of the new Charities Regulator John Farrelly to comment on the Console scandal won’t do much to rebuild our confidence. Instead of expressing legitimate concern at the revelations to date and the undeniable existence of that HSE audit, Mr Farrelly refused to be drawn on the matter for fear, said a spokesman, of prejudicing future investigations.

This is just not good enough. Charities that capitalise on people’s grief, their suffering, their sympathy and their goodwill have to be held to the highest standard. At the very least, the Charities Regulator needs to explain why this did not happen with Console.

Donors have to be assured that those who accredit them, fund them and are charged with overseeing them have acute antennae for any whiff of dishonesty, financial mismanagement and governance failings. We also need to know that those in positions of authority share our disgust and outrage when deliberate duplicity emerges. If RTÉ could establish that Paul Kelly had a conviction for deception, that he was apparently plausible enough to pass himself off as a qualified doctor at the age of 25, then those agencies that lavished him with public funds could have checked him out also.

Even the most superficial probe into his past should have turned up evidence of his ‘ordination’ and his apparent masquerading as a priest and a religious brother in fundraising activities, but even now, after all we’ve learned about the people running these multi-million euro charities in recent years, it still falls to the media to do so.

Perhaps Bertie Ahern, or any of those others who crossed his path in the past, didn’t associate the ‘Rev Paul Kelly’ with the urbane humanitarian who won a People of the Year Award in 2014 for his work with Console, but it’s hard to believe that no alarm bells sounded with any resonance until journalists got involved.

As the charity sector is once again in turmoil, and Console’s fundraising is certain to take a hit, ‘Dr’ or ‘Brother’ or ‘Reverend’ Paul Kelly seems to have gone ground. Or perhaps he’s dug out that airline pilot’s uniform and taken flight.