The arrest of a senior ISPCC official last night will reverberate throughout the charity and childcare sector for weeks and months ahead.
Regardless of whether the official is charged with and convicted of an offence, the fact remains that the ISPCC has loomed exceptionally large in the charity and childcare sector for the past decade.
This has coincided with the time in which Mr Cian O Tighearnaigh, previously the organisation's chief fundraiser, has been its chief executive.
During that time the ISPCC - and in particular Mr O Tighearnaigh - promoted the organisation's campaigns with an intensity reached by no other charity.
These campaigns included Childline, the abolition of corporal punishment and the introduction of mandatory reporting.
The organisation has been a strong and constant critic of the failings of the statutory sector and especially of the health boards. O Tighearnaigh, has made himself unpopular in the statutory social work and childcare field. Social workers stung by Mr O Tighearnaigh's criticisms point to the closure by him of a number of family resource centres since he became chief executive just over a decade ago.
In doing so, they claim, he took the ISPCC away from the "sharp end" of child protection work.
Indeed, Mr Brendan Howlin, when he was Minister for Health, took the highly unusual step of writing a newspaper article attacking Mr O Tighearnaigh on these and other grounds.
The ISPCC also generated criticism because of the very large number of collections it held and because it paid commission to many of its collectors.
Last December the Sunday Business Post reported that the money in 10 buckets submitted by collectors over a number of days had been undercounted in every case.
The report led to a Garda Fraud Squad investigation which in turn led to last night's arrest of a senior official. Mr O Tighearnaigh also found his organisation under attack for other reasons in recent days.
In particular, the derostering of Childline and volunteers for Leanbh (a project to help children begging on the streets) because they would not sell £100 tickets for the ISPCC generated huge negative publicity for the organisation.
Yesterday, the ISPCC was finalising plans to involve accountants Deloitte & Touche and outside organisations, such as health boards and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, to help it deal with the crisis.
Last night's arrest of the senior official, with whom the chairwoman of the ISPCC, Ms Mary Bennett, had been discussing these moves, came as a shock to her. She learned of the arrest seconds before she spoke to an Irish Times reporter at midnight.
Regardless of the outcome of last night's events, she and the national executive of the ISPCC now face a struggle to re-establish the credibility of the organisation following a deluge of bad publicity.
There seems little doubt that this will involve a sea-change in the way in which the ISPCC is organised and in how it goes about doing its work.
It may be that the future of the ISPCC will be found to lie in a return to the sort of family support centres which Mr O Tighearnaigh closed down.
There is a wider aspect to this. The country has a large, well-off, powerful and unaccountable charity sector.
Yet despite many calls for regulation, governments have displayed a strange reluctance to tackle the issue.
It is this, and not the tribulations of the ISPCC, which will reverberate for months to come.