OPINION:The work of the charity must come ahead of any individual, writes Goal's media officer
I AM employed by Goal, but in the context of this column I hold a brief for no one except myself.
I owe John O’Shea a lot. When I needed help, he gave it to me, and over the years was a good friend. It pains me therefore to write the following, but I do so in the interests of what I believe to be proper.
Self-evidently, whatever assistance I received from O’Shea is irrelevant when set beside his contribution to bettering and saving the lives of countless people in the developing world. However, from my perspective, the two are connected.
Since he announced that he would retire from the position of chief executive of Goal, a part of me feels that I should go to O’Shea’s aid. But I can resist that urge. For the organisation he established, and specifically the vital work that it does, are infinitely more important than any individual.
Goal is a very special aid agency. It is usually among the first at the scene of a disaster, and always one of the last to leave. It is no petty outfit, but has almost 3,000 field-based employees delivering emergency relief and development programmes across 13 countries – something of which its founder should be very proud.
On Tuesday afternoon, I returned from Maban County in South Sudan, where Goal is working at a refugee camp sited only 36km from the border with Sudan, from where the 35,000 camp inhabitants fled conflict. The Goal people at Maban are putting in 16-hour days, seven days a week, and living in very basic circumstances.
It is they and their colleagues in 12 other countries who exemplify what Goal stands for. It is they who are the heart and soul of the organisation. How disgraceful that their work and, God help us, the plight of the people who so desperately need their help have recently been overshadowed and undermined by the public bloodletting that has taken place at Goal head office in Dún Laoghaire.
With the imminent departure of its chief executive, the internal conflict within the higher echelons of Goal is now over, in the sense that “victors” and “vanquished” have been irreversibly established.
It is time to move on. The only possible casualties of further public skirmishing are the organisation and its beneficiaries. Yet, regardless of this fact, a few people are selectively briefing the media in a hopeless attempt to have O’Shea reinstated or a surrogate put in his place.
I have more knowledge than most of what went on over the past few years, and can debunk some of what is being said and inferred in this prolongation of an already-lost battle. The notion that O’Shea was forced to relinquish his position because he stood up against some kind of tax-avoidance scheme operated by a few senior managers is ludicrous.
I am not a senior manager but, as a UK citizen, was one of those who was asked to sign up to such a contract, and I did so in good faith. No one at Goal ever has, to my knowledge, deliberately avoided paying their due amount of income tax. The implication such was the case is an attempt to reinforce the illusion that O’Shea was the unfortunate victim of a cabal of Goal senior managers.
The complaints did not emanate solely from within the Dún Laoghaire office. A portion came from former and serving Goal people in the field, who are/were far removed from head office politics. I am not qualified to comment on their veracity, but I do know that the complaints were neither singular nor a recent phenomenon. Frankly, it had been clear for some time to anyone close to the action (location-wise) that O’Shea’s position was becoming increasingly untenable. The outcome was inevitable.
What now for Goal? Its major donors are satisfied with how it uses its funding (and so they should be), and its field operatives only want to be left alone to get on with their jobs.
Two other constituencies are very important to Goal: its home-based employees and the public.
The first should reflect on whether they joined an aid organisation merely to slavishly follow a charismatic leader or to assist the poor of the developing world. Similarly, the public who have always supported Goal must ask themselves if their motivation was John O’Shea or the sterling work of the organisation he founded.
To those for whom the answer is the latter, the way forward should be clear: Goal has vital work to do – help it get on with it.