Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I, too, welcome Mr. McBride and his opening statement. The Chairman has presented the background to the joint committee's decision to invite him to appear before us. I acknowledge the speed with which he responded and welcome his open and honest statement in which he identified various issues that have been in the public domain in recent days.

I will steer my questions in two directions, namely, the issues of confidence and retrospective or historical cases, both of which Mr. McBride covered. I propose to ask some pointed questions on the issue of confidence. Is Tusla satisfied with its internal information technology system? Mr. McBride will be accustomed to being asked that question as I have been asking it for a long time. Is Tusla satisfied with the framework in place for sharing information? If, for example, a child leaves Galway and moves to Dublin, how is this dealt with by counsellors? I have some doubts about whether such connectivity is in place. Does Mr. McBride have confidence in this regard?

Is Tusla satisfied with multi-party involvement? By this I mean if a sufficiently good sieving mechanism is in place for sharing information among responsible persons. When an allegation is made does Tusla have a sufficient number of qualified staff to investigate it? Mr. McBride's statement that there are 4,000 Tusla staff is news to me because the Minister was unable to answer when I asked her a question on staff numbers in the past two weeks. Does Tusla have enough staff to do its job? In 2015, it was allocated an additional €6 million to recruit more staff. Have staff been hired to deal with the large number of retrospective cases identified in the detailed report completed in 2015?

Does Tusla have proper checks and balances in place to deal with people coming forward with allegations? I assume the figure of 150,000 allegations, of which 50,000 related to allegations of sexual abuse, has since declined. Are proper checks and balances in place to check and verify allegations?

On the issue of historical or "bottom drawer" cases, as I like to call them, does Tusla have a sufficient number of staff working on these? Mr. McBride indicated the number of such cases had fallen dramatically in the past 12 months. When I asked a question on adult disclosure cases on 5 July 2016 I was informed that a large proportion of the 8,865 such cases that were live in 2015 were still in high priority listing in 2016. How many of these cases are still identified as high priority cases?

Are cases involving historical disclosures prioritised immediately as either high, medium or low risk? I ask this question because an abuser could potentially be at large until a case is fully investigated.

How does Tusla categorise the original allegation that comes forward? Is it in a high, medium or low risk capacity? My understanding is that when retrospective cases come forward they are deemed to be low risk whereas I thought they would be high risk until they are investigated fully. Does Tusla have the manpower to deliver on that?