Mr. Pat Healy:

No. That is one of the relevant points. Among the 47 that we set out, Ann's family is one of the 18 families that identified that they had a good experience. One of the challenges that arose regarding this matter was that, in their view, they actually had a good experience of working with the mother, and that had influenced them in how they dealt with the matter. There were no issues of any kind. I mentioned in the previous contribution that Ann was never in care and there were never child protection issues or anything of that nature. She went for the assessment simply because she was at the age where she was graduating, having been in a special school. I refer to day-to-day services.

I shall refer to the issue at the time in 2009 after Grace was moved out of the facility to a voluntary provider. I was trying to articulate that, for a period, the Devine report did not identify any particular case, or did not identify Ann’s case. The investigation was going on. Clearly, from the report, there was information locally to the effect that she was attending the location in question, and that is when engagement with the family took place and so on. I think what happened then was that a senior manager in the area was reviewing the Devine report implementation and assessing it and, in that context, raised the issue of taking more decisive action in relation to Ann. At that point, the Devine report had been concluded and the Garda investigation was still going on. It was at that point that the foster mother was written to and instructed not to take placements any more, and the family was also written to.

Of course, in the consideration of this, one of the issues concerns how one deals with circumstances where the family of a vulnerable adult feels that individual is being looked after satisfactorily and that there is no concern, yet there may be other concerns and one must consider how to deal with that. Certainly, from 2013 onwards, the lady was in five-day residential care and then seven-day residential care. She still visits her mother. She comes out of residential care every second weekend and visits her mother. We have been advised, right up to the current time, that the mother indicates that she does not place Ann in that home anymore. She does visit.