If the Public Service Commission had had a tad more experience, it might have just sent Mrs June Spence-Jarrett home on early retirement, instead of transferring whatever shortcomings it feared in her to another place.

Wherever she is reassigned, it is very likely that she will start out under a dark cloud and that staff under her will question her skills set. Mrs Spence-Jarrett herself might begin to feel ‘cute’ in such circumstances. After all, to be tagged with the dreadful Armadale fire deaths, for allegedly putting 23 girls in space for five, is not a badge that one can wear proudly.

The same could be said of Major Richard Reese who was transferred from the National Security Ministry over the Armadale tragedy, because he was head of the Correctional Services Department and boss of Mrs Spence-Jarrett at the time of the decision to send the hapless girls to the place of their eventual demise.

And yet there is a bigger point to be made in this issue about how does a Government treat with public servants who appear to have fallen down on their job. Because it’s an ill wind that blows no good, if public servants begin to feel that they risk getting the short end of the stick when things do not work in the public sector.

Schoolchildren in Mocho know that in the best of times, Jamaican public servants are caught between a rock and a hard place. It is called the perils of underdevelopment.

In the case of Armadale, we start out with problems that usually have their origins in the poverty and squalor of many homes, from which the State must try to protect our children, by removing them to a place of safety. But there are never enough resources to provide an adequate number of quality places.

Too often, the staff in these woefully under-resourced State homes have to dig into their own pockets, from their meagre earnings to help out, because they have got attached to the wards of those homes and hate to see them deprived.

These same staff are too frequently given basket to carry water. And when the service eventually breaks down, they must turn around and face the blame.

We are not perforce arguing that this is the situation in which Mrs Spence-Jarrett finds herself. For if the respected Armadale Enquirer, Justice Paul Harrison is correct, she is “uncaring and inhumane” and he also found her “evasive and less than truthful” when she testified before the Commission.

What we are trying to work through is the necessity for policy development, at the Government level, that ensures that when blame is to be ascribed, it is done without destroying the integrity of a public servant who may well have been given that proverbial basket to carry water.

It is not too late to spare the public service and Mrs Spence-Jarrett the agony that keeping her on is bound to engender.