Mr. Mervyn Taylor:

I do not think I am in a position to answer. I would have originally expected it last summer. I think we may see it within this year but any influence that this sub-committee or the main committee can bring to bear on that would be important. It will be a significant report because, we understand, it will put forward a legislative framework.

It will have an impact on every organisation from the HSE to the Central Bank. That is quite a span. It is not that every older person needs safeguarding – far from it – but it is a way of focusing attention and resources on those who do. It will have important implications. At the moment, it is very hard to share information because of GDPR, but some information needs to be shared and the law is a little unclear. In this regard, we have asked the Data Protection Commission to clarify and give guidelines on sharing information related to vulnerable people. We are now seeing a cohort of sexual predators in congregated care and encountering issues such as people exhibiting sexually predatory behaviour arising out of dementia, but we have great difficulty in getting anybody within the system to address these issues. They really are issues.

Safeguarding provides an overall mechanism to achieve a route forward but there has to be a national adult safeguarding authority. The safeguarding teams have to be independent of the HSE. A couple of years ago, during the Covid pandemic, there was an appalling case where a client of a nursing home died in a hospital with maggots in a wound. A report on that is due. I will not go into the details but one of the issues that came up was that because the person is in a private nursing home, the HSE safeguarding teams say they have no legal authority to go into it; yet the HSE is administering the very nursing home support scheme that keeps the person in that home. These are examples of how our public funding and policy are not joined up.

The safeguarding legislation is vital because it will be a framework across financial services, social services and, indeed, some educational services. I am aware that the Cathaoirleach is interested in this. Former Senator Colette Kelleher first put it forward in 2017. There was all-party support for it at the time. What will come forward from the Labour Relations Commission will be a framework that we hope will be almost oven-ready for the Oireachtas to debate and move forward fairly quickly into legislation.