Ms Mary Farrell:

No. I will explain how it worked. The courts became the Courts Service in the period 1999 to 2000. A lot was changing around that time and, apparently, it came to light that no accounts had been sent in from the Courts Service overall for over a decade. We had been in the system even at that point. There was a Committee of Public Accounts meeting about that, and there was a lot going on. In the end, it was agreed that the whole system would be computerised and that the National Treasury Management Agency would be involved in advising how these funds should be invested. Mercer was involved initially as well. The computerisation was set up and they advertised for financial investors to take on the investment of these funds. That is re-advertised I believe every five years but State Street Global Advisors are the people who manage it. They are the fund managers.

The Deputy will find all the Courts Service financial statements online and they will tell him much more than I can tell him but there is an investment committee which is comprised of judges and various people from the Courts Service, the Office of Wards of Court and so on. The last time it was mentioned in the Committee of Public Accounts was on 13 July last and questions were asked about the expertise of the investment committee. It is my recollection that it transpired that only nine of the 11 people on that investment committee had any expertise in this area of investments. That is a sorry story.

The Courts Service says it has independent experts on the investment committee as well. That was discussed and it was asked how it acquired this person. It was said that the position rotated. The expert was named and the position rotated but when we looked at our records we could see that this person has been in situsince 2008, and this is 2017, so I do not know where the rotation is occurring or how it is occurring. All kinds of questions like that arise.

As I said earlier, if one looks for the information one will get it if one knows what to look for. That means information about the investments, how they performed over the year, the folio statement showing what came in and what went out, and what is currently in the fund. They would be the three documents I would look for, but we have to remember that very few people are able to do that. That is a fact. It is very difficult to say this but there are very few people who can keep up with the care of this ward. Some people are caring for them at home, in institutions or in various situations but the care is still there. It does not matter whether someone is caring for them on a daily basis. They are still involved, still a committee, still engaged and still working on their behalf. As the members can see here today, they are doing various things on their behalf and the last thing they want to be doing is chasing up investments.

When we come down to the actual investments, they are not explained very well. The Deputy would have to look at the report online to find out the detail of that. He would not get it anywhere else. If one were to track those reports from year to year one would see how they have changed over the years and become more transparent in that they give more information every year, but it is interesting that they say that the Wards of Court Office acts in place of a prudent parent. I do know any prudent parents who behaves like this, but what would I know? One would have to go to a lot of trouble to find out the information Deputy Wallace is discussing. It is not always open to people to get that information or to understand it. It is not provided in a format.

As for auditing, they will say they have external and internal auditors and that all these things are well managed, yet there is a proviso that states they may not get everything right in their online report. We have to wonder if everything is all right and who is checking it. There is no external scrutiny.

In 2000, it was proposed that the Comptroller and Auditor General would audit these funds and it seemed to us that that was an agreement, that there was no impediment to that happening and that documentation had been sent to the committee, yet that never happened. We were presuming this was happening and that everything was going according to plan but it never happened, and it is still not happening. There is no external public scrutiny of these funds in that the Oireachtas cannot question them. It does not come under the remit of the Committee of Public Accounts even though it has looked at it because of that difficulty with the Comptroller and Auditor General not auditing these funds, and the Comptroller and Auditor General is still not able to audit them. There are impediments to that and the reply from the Department of Justice and Equality is in the documentation as to why that is the case.