By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor
BOSSES at St John of God spent thousands of euro hiring private detectives to carry out covert surveillance on employees, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
One of those employees has come forward as a whistleblower to tell her story. Breda Claffey says being spied on by her employers had a devastating impact on her and left her feeling ‘humiliated’ and ‘crushed’.
Employment law specialists condemned the surveillance as unacceptable and ‘indicative of an exceptionally unhealthy culture’ within an organisation.
This is just the latest in a series of controversies the MoS has exposed at the St John of God charity, including €1.6m in secret top-ups that was paid to 14 senior managers.
The first Mrs Claffey knew of the surveillance, which continued over eight weeks in 2007, was when she was called into a meeting in October 2007 and told she was being suspended on full pay pending an investigation into alleged discrepancies in ‘time and attendance’ in the course of her work at the charity’s centre at St Raphael’s in Celbridge, Co. Kildare.
Two other employees were also called into the meeting. Mrs Claffey was handed an envelope and told its contents would explain everything. Inside she found surveillance reports detailing her daily movements through July and August 2007 and again in October 2007.
The reports included details such as what time she left her house in the morning, when she arrived at work, how long her car was parked there, and what time she returned to her home.
“I came home and closed the blinds. I was terrified of being watched”
She said that immediately after the meeting: ‘I came home and closed the blinds. I was terrified of being watched.’ At the time she was put under surveillance, Mrs Claffey – a longstanding employee at the charity – was responsible for securing community employment for intellectually disabled St John of God clients. She has successfully placed 43 clients of St Raphael’s in jobs in the local community.
Prior to this Mrs Claffey had an unblemished employment record and had received no written or verbal warnings about any concerns.
‘They said I was being put out of work because of my time-keeping and attendance,’ Mrs Claffey said. ‘They wanted me to leave my phone, my diary and my keys and to leave the building and go.’ She contacted her union who arranged to meet with John Pepper, then human resources chief of St John of God. Mr Pepper later became group CEO of the charity. Mrs Claffey was able to explain any alleged discrepancies in her time-keeping and her mileage claims and was reinstated in her original position after three months and worked at the Celbridge centre until her recent retirement.
‘I got on to Siptu,’ she said, ‘we went for meetings with John Pepper and his secretary at the time and we went through each of these days and I was able to say where I was.’ She added: ‘I was crushed by it.
My husband had been seriously ill and I had no fight left in me.’ She said she felt humiliated by the experience and ‘that’s why I’ve taken early retirement’.
The surveillance reports were ordered and provided to Clare Dempsey by Insight Investigations – a now defunct Dublin-based firm of private investigators.
Clare Dempsey was at the time responsible for running St Raphael’s though she is now CEO of John of God Community Services Ltd – the group firm which receives €150m annually from the HSE.
Ms Dempsey, who earns €125,000 annually, and St John of God group CEO John Pepper, who earns €185,000, were among the recipients of the €1.6m in secret top-ups paid to 14 senior managers at the charity in 2013.
With industry prices for surveillance of this type costing about €50 an hour plus mileage the cost to the St John of God group could have come to €15,000.
Union sources in the health area said last night they had not come across another case in which an employee had been spied on in this fashion. Legal experts too were baffled by the decision of a charity to spy on its workers.
‘It’s more akin to something you’d expect from MI5 or MI6 but not from a charity,’ said one prominent lawyer who asked not to be named.
Another employment rights lawyer, Kevin Brophy, questioned why the St John of God group had not simply asked its employees about any concerns it may have had.
‘The first step shouldn’t be a private investigator,’ he said. ‘What happened to all the other steps before that? If there’s a concern then they should put it to her.’ Mr Brophy said a private investigator should be ‘absolutely the last resort’ and ‘should certainly not be utilised for something like timekeeping.’ He also pointed to the negative atmosphere such practices would spread throughout an organisation.
‘It’s like a cancer that would go through the organisation,’ he said. ‘It’s indicative of an exceptionally unhealthy culture.’ Numerous employees of the St John of God group – including a separate whistleblower who helped the MoS expose the secret top-ups scandal – said they had heard of private detectives being used by management.
“Real concerns about data protection.”
Aidan Twomey, an employment law barrister and consultant to the International Labour Organisation, said he would never advise putting employees under surveillance.
‘Employees have rights and they need to be respected. It’s certainly not something that I’d be recommending to people.
‘On a purely legal level there are real concerns around data protection. You are gathering personal data relating to individuals without their consent and you’re processing it without their consent and using it for purposes that they have not consented to and if you ever end up in a dispute situation with them it’s going to be difficult to rely on that evidence in any event.’
The practice is considered so problematic that the Data Protection Commissioner’s latest annual report warned it should only be carried out in appropriate circumstances ‘with the final objective being an active involvement of An Garda SÃochána or other prosecutorial authority’. A spokesman for the office of the Data Protection Commissioner said there was ‘a clear responsibility on all companies and businesses who hire private investigators under the Data Protection Acts to ensure that all work carried out on their behalf by private investigators is done lawfully’.
Recent data protection case law has established that it is illegal for a company to pass personal data to a private detective agency for the purposes of surveillance or for any other purpose unless that entity has put a contract in place with in line with Section 2C(3) of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 which would render the private investigator to be a data processor.’
The MoS asked St John of God and a representative of Insight Investigations if a contract had been put in place in this fashion. We also asked why the group had put staff under surveillance, whether it was routine practice, how much had been spent on private detectives and whether or not they were currently being used.
They declined to comment. On top of the surveillance and €1.6m secret top-ups, the MoS has revealed that at least five of CEO John Pepper’s family are employed at a St John of God facility in Co. Louth.
Another controversy involved €23,000 being spent on a management trip to Orlando when the charity’s services were being cut back home.
investigations@newsscoops.org
