Dr. Fergal Lynch:

On the Oberstown centre, I will add a few points to what the Minister has said. The reason I have to leave now is I have a meeting with Mr. Bergin and others on Oberstown issues which I regard as very important. As the Minister said, we have confidence in senior management, but it is very important that we engage with them fully to make sure they are working intensively with everybody. This has been acknowledged and Mr. Bergin has been working extremely hard in that regard.

On the planned timing for taking all 17 years olds into the Oberstown centre, as the Minister said, we hope to do this as rapidly as possible. Staffing is the issue. There is one piece of information in which the committee may be interested. We have been doing this on an incremental basis in the past few years. The Oberstown centre has been taking 16 years olds since 2012 and in 2015 it began to take 17 year old remands. We received some interesting data recently from it on how many young males would have been in adult prison if we had not moved to this system incrementally. The total figure between 2012 and late-2015 is 428. There are 428 cases of young males detained in the Oberstown centre between 2012 and 2015 who would have ended up in adult prison if the Minister had not incrementally increased the number of people and type of cases we can deal with in Oberstown. The final component is 17 year olds on committal. While we have not achieved this, all other children between 16 and nearly 18 years are now catered for and 428 cases have benefitted because of this. I hope this information is of some use to the committee.