Ms Tracy O'Keeffe:

The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act was enacted at the end of 2015. It provides for the setting up of the new decision support service within the Mental Health Commission, which is under the aegis of the Minister for Health. There is quite a lot of work involved in that. It involves co-operation between the Department of Justice and Equality, the Department of Health and the Mental Health Commission itself. A steering group was set up in early 2016 to oversee that process, and its work is ongoing. The process of recruiting the director is prescribed in the Act. It has to be done by the Public Appointments Service, PAS. That person was to be appointed by the Mental Health Commission. That process has concluded and the director took up the position at the beginning of October of 2017. She is now in place and is working very actively towards ensuring that everything is in place for the Act to be commenced. There is a tendering process ongoing at the moment for business process analyst and project management expertise so that we can scope out an implementation plan. There are various components that have to be in place and regulations that have to be made, some by the Minister for Justice and Equality, some by the Minister for Health and some by the director. Codes of practice are being developed. That process is under way with the National Disability Authority and the HSE. Quite a lot of work is going on in the background.

In terms of a commencement date, because so many of the provisions of the Act are interlinked, it is not really possible to introduce this on a phased basis. Many of the parts have to come into operation together. For example, the transition of people from wardship cannot happen until the new decision-making support arrangements are in place. They have to travel together as well. The co-decision-making agreements and the decision-making representative provisions travel together because they are very closely interlinked. There is an awful lot of work going on to get this Act ready for commencement, and we cannot give a specific date at this time.