Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The two examples in Ireland are the nursing and midwifery board and the Medical Council. In those cases, hearings are by default held in public unless there is a specific reason for them not to be in public. This is really about giving confidence to the teaching profession, as well as the public, in following that model. The earlier investigations are about ensuring they are appropriate to go to full hearing. I presume there will be cases where there would not be sufficient evidence to suggest that there should not be full hearings. The model we propose is that by default a hearing would be public but it would have gone through a process to clarify whether the action is appropriate for a hearing. A judgment can be made that it would not be appropriate to have the hearing in public and then it would be held in private.