Ms Frances Spillane:

I thank Senator Kelleher. To answer the points made, yes, it is correct that our view is that we should focus on health initially. However, we accept, of course, that there are implications for other Departments, and, if the Senator wishes, we can outline some of the comments that we received from other Departments when we circulate the Senator's Private Members' Bill. The Department also accepts fully that this is an urgent matter and that is why we will be bringing a memo to Government by the end of November. We accept fully, from the experience of Sage and the HSE, that there are problems and that this needs to be tackled. I am sorry if I gave the impression in setting out the long period of time for child protection that we should spend that long in terms of adults. It took a very long time for that decision to be taken in terms of development of policy. I was involved in that at the time. Discussion papers were issued and there was much discussion, but action was not taken for a very long time. It is quite a big thing to put a statutory obligation on people to report a risk of abuse. It needs a lot of preparation and it took a huge amount of time. It will be very interesting to see how this works out in the area of children. I accept fully that this is a very urgent matter, and that is why we are prioritising this. We have assigned additional resources to this work within Mr. Redmond's unit. We fully accept that this is an urgent matter.