Mr. Fred McBride:

My colleagues may assist me as I go along. Deputy Rabbitte asked if we had confidence in our IT system. I am afraid the answer to that question is "Not yet". We have inherited 17 areas as part of the HSE. A number of those areas had different systems. Some had paper systems. We are now attempting to roll out what we call our national child care information system, which will be our client information system. It will be national and will produce management information. We are making some progress in rolling that out throughout the course of 2017 and into 2018.

Suffice it to say, the investment in ICT infrastructure has been insufficient for many years. Some investment is now available to us to take our national child care information system forward. That project has been a big priority for us over the past couple of years. Our board identified one of our top organisational risks as not having a national information system. In answer to Deputy Rabbitte's question, we are not satisfied with the national system at the moment but we are working very hard to roll it out.

The Deputy also asked about multi-agency information and a sifting mechanism. In terms of allegations of abuse by adults, as I said in my opening statement, child protection social workers would have ordinarily, through their training and education, been focused on how we protect the child. The determination of the veracity of an allegation against a perpetrator is a much more specialist skill. We must now develop specialist posts and teams to undertake that skill. Traditionally, child protection social workers are not trained in the skill. We must upskill ourselves and training is beginning to be put in place in most areas.

The Deputy asked if Tusla had enough staff. We are still trying to recruit staff. In 2016 we filled 514 posts of which 320 were front-line social work grades. There are another 119 posts, of which 83 were social workers who accepted posts. They are due to land in the first quarter of this year. Recruitment is a big challenge for us. Only 250 social work students graduate from Irish institutions every year. To recruit we had to go to Northern Ireland and I, personally, went to the University of Ulster. We are trying to recruit in the UK in order to fulfil our recruitment targets. We are very much in recruitment mode. We have managed to recruit some additional staff and reduced the number of unallocated cases. There is still much more to be done in that regard.

The Deputy specifically asked if we had enough people to work on historic cases. We are beginning to train more people in specific interviewing skills.

The Deputy asked if historic allegations were given high priority. Did I misunderstand her question?