John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To add to what the Chairman is saying, one critical element of this cannot be forgotten. The Chairman has mentioned the 30 or 40 potential victims in this case. Many of those alleged victims are non-verbal. In some cases, it is 22 or 23 years since these alleged crimes took place. In many cases, the witnesses or perpetrators have passed on. The urgency required by the HSE to deal with the matter as time moved on was absent. There was no desire to deal with this and no attempt was made to do so, because as time moved on and decades passed, reports were issued, it was prevaricated upon and the long finger came out at every juncture. The Statute of Limitations does come into this.

In my opinion, part of the reason this has been put on the long finger is that there is an attitude that time will deal with this and that prosecutorially it may not be possible to bring some of these people to justice. That is appalling. The HSE was aware of the gravity of these alleged crimes, going back to the 1990s. It was reminded of them in 1999 and surely at that point, when those protected disclosures had been made, there would have been a requirement within the organisation to deal with it and, as Mr. O'Brien said, some urgency. This urgency was not there. There are legal issues around the duration between when a crime is allegedly committed and when it is brought to a court. In this case, it could be 23 years. There was no urgency whatsoever here.