Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of historical sex abuse of children at St. John Ambulance. Mick Finnegan, one of the survivors of that abuse, is in the Gallery. It is almost a year since the publication of the Shannon report into this. It will be over a year since the organisation received a copy of that report. It made a series of recommendations, one of which was the employment of a full-time safeguarding officer. Now, almost a year later, St. John Ambulance has come to the Government saying it does not have the funding to pay for that, and the Government has agreed to fund a €100,000-a-year post.

First, does the Minister agree that it is not acceptable - in fact, it is outrageous - that a year has passed and, at the end of that year, St. John Ambulance discovers all of a sudden it does not have the money to fund this, when it was supposedly in the process of employing the person, and now says it does not have the money and needs the Government to step in? Second, will the Minister agree that the Government needs to make a condition for this money? It needs to be conditional on a clear-out of the board of anyone who was a senior officer at the time of the disclosures or who was on the board at the time of the disclosures and the full implementation of all recommendations?

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