Lawyers for Angela Kerins, the former chief executive of Rehab, have said she believes the manner in which a Dáil committee in seeking to compel her to appear before it is "exceeding its lawful authority".
Eames Solicitors, in a letter last Wednesday to the Oireachtas Committee on Procedure and Privileges (CPP), said they were "surprised and disappointed" their client's concerns about "bias" on the part of individual members of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee were not deemed relevant to the CPP's decision-making about whether to grant the PAC powers to force Ms Kerins to appear in front of it.
Ms Kerins’s lawyers said they believed it was “fundamentally misconceived” for the CPP not to take their client’s allegations of “bias” on board when making its considerations. The PAC wishes to question Ms Kerins, who stepped down from Rehab in April, about several issues, but the exact nature of what it wants to discuss is not known.
Eames Solicitors said the CPP, by allowing the PAC to force Ms Kerins to appear, had “the potential to interfere with the constitutional rights of private citizens including our client”.
‘Constitutional justice’
It said that “constitutional justice and procedural fairness” should mean Ms Kerins had the right to know why exactly she was being compelled to appear before the PAC. She should be given a chance to respond to these reasons before any decision was made on whether or not to make her appear, her lawyers said.
“Our client has suffered damage to her reputation and injury by reason of the wrong done by the PAC in bringing her before the PAC in circumstances where PAC has exceeded its lawful authority and questioned her in an unfair and damaging manner in making commentary upon her actions,” Eames Solicitors said.
“The question of bias goes to the very jurisdiction of the PAC to proceed with any inquiry whatsoever insofar as our client is concerned and your committee is statutorily mandated to satisfy itself” that the PAC was acting correctly, they said.
‘Without bias’
Eames said Ms Kerins believed the CPP had the “principal role” to ensure the PAC acted within its “remit and without bias on the part of its members”.
Eames noted the CPP had yet to consider the PAC’s application to force its client to appear before it, but added: “We must repeat our request for disclosure of the basis presented to the committee for seeking compellability powers and our request to be heard by your committee in advance of any decision.”
PAC members also want to question Frank Flannery, also a former Rehab chief executive, about his pension and involvement in paid lobbying on behalf of Rehab.
