YMCA management fiercely criticised by counsel Gail Furness in royal commission into sex abuse hearing CEO Phillip Hare and YMCA management have copped fierce criticism. Recommendation YMCA manager should be referred to DPP for lying Serious questions raised about whether senior managers "fit and proper" Counsel assisting the royal commission's submission scathing THE management of the YMCA has been slammed in the royal commission into sex abuse and one should be referred to prosecutors for lying, counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness SC said today. Ms Furness said that the evidence given by YMCA NSW chief executive Phillip Hare and the general manager of children's services Liam Whitely "raised serious questions about whether (they) are fit and proper" people to oversee an organisation responsible for looking after children. Ms Furness has recommended that children's services co-ordinator Jacqui Barnat should be referred to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions after she gave false evidence that no employees would ever be allowed work with children without a working with children check. The damning submissions come after the commission looked into how a paedophile, Jonathan Lord, was able to get a job with the country's largest child care organisation and go on to abuse young children. Lord, 26, was jailed last year for 10 years with a non-parole period of six years after admitting abusing 12 children aged between six and 10 while working for the YMCA, including some he was babysitting. Ms Furness said that the YMCA was not a child-safe environment when Lord worked there and that it remains not safe for children. She said that the organisation had still not done its own investigation into how Lord was recruited and into the root causes of what went wrong. Lord was recruited to work at the YMCA's five before and after school centres at Caringbah in August 2009 by Ms Barnat. The commission has heard that had she done a proper check, he would never have been employed because he had been sacked from Camp America after being found alone in a dark cabin with an eight-year-old boy. But Ms Barnat did not check his claim that he had left for personal reasons. When she rang one of his referees, she did not discover that the referee was actually Lord's stepfather. Senior Counsel Gail Furness SC has delivered a scathing submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Picture: Jeremy Piper Source: News Limited She had told the commission in a private hearing that no Caringbah staff member would work with children before they were cleared by the obligatory working with children check. However Lord was allowed to work with children before his check was completed. "In her evidence before the royal commission during public hearings, Jacqui Barnat accepted that evidence previously given by her in respect of those matters was false," Ms Furness said in her submissions. It is submitted that the failure by YMCA NSW to comply with its obligations under the (law) in relation to Jonathan Lord was not an isolated incident. The YMCA NSW had on other occasions not conducted working with children checks prior to a number of YMCA Caringbah staff commencing working with children. One staff member had been told to ring her referee herself and make a note of what they said in her own personnel record. Ms Barnat's barrister, Ian Temby QC, told the commission today that she "sincerely regrets" having given false evidence which was factually wrong but she never meant to mislead the commission and should not be referred for any prosecution. The YMCA NSW has said in its submissions that it would be "unfair" and incorrect to say it was not a childsafe organisation and that the royal commission did not have the power to make such a finding. The organisation said that it accepted that its recruiting procedure in 2009 at Caringbah was not deficient but because things may have gone wrong at Caringbah, that could not translate to NSW YMCA as a whole. It also said that recommendations to find that Mr Hare and Mr Whitely were not fit and proper people to run such an organisation were unjustified, harsh and unsubstantial and would cause "indelible and irreparable" harm to their reputations. Submissions into how the royal commission should deal with the YMCA continue today. Its inquiry into the Catholic Church's Towards Healing process has been adjourned until late January.