Mr. John O'Driscoll:

The most important thing to say is that these children are not missing. The cases in question are included among those about which Dr. Shannon concluded that the overwhelming finding was that gardaí commit great effort to be sensitive and compassionate when they exercise section 12 powers. In all cases examined, the audit found appropriate restrained use of section 12.

What happened in regard to those 31 cases, and Dr. Geoffrey Shannon makes reference to the fact that he examined 500,000 PULSE records, when a member has a section 12 incident, they press a button relating to category, which says "Child Welfare - Tusla Notification". They then go on to incident type and choose from a menu including "Section 12, Child Care Act Invoked". In terms of "Role of Child", they choose "Tusla Notification Concerning". He got all those records. A discrepancy was found and 31 were not included there. That is because, at that point in the process, a number of members picked a multiple case option or whatever. That was because these incidents related to other incidents so 31 cases had gone into another category. He had full details of those 31. He included those in his overall examination and found that those 31 cases were also dealt with properly. We are happy that, this morning, Maeve Lucas, the executive director of One in Four, when speaking about the report published today, also said that from its experience the Garda Síochána shows consistency and deals with these cases in a professional manner.

On the extent to which we opened up PULSE to Dr. Shannon, he describes that there is no other equivalent report in the world and referred to the extent to which members engaged with him and were allowed to engage with him. It is important to point out that we first chose him to be the person to do the report. We are working through all the recommendations with him and ensuring that we implement them in a way that is satisfactory to him. I have all the recommendations here in an implementation plan. That implementation plan is examined at the overall strategy meeting I engage in with Tusla and we are ensuring that every one of those is being implemented. Obviously, some of them will take longer than others to implement. Above all, there is no child that he refers to who is missing.