Dr. John Lawlor:

I was going to come to the up to date ones. I will take that first, if the Deputy does not mind. It was the last thing she asked. Our safeguarding team would deal with a volume of work like this. These are 2017 statistics. There were 160 advice requests, 62 new cases, 27 referrals to statutory authorities - the Deputy will understand that we have responsibility to report - 41 cases closed, and 21 cases still open. Those cases would range in a spectrum from what is probably an inappropriate term, the less serious, to the most serious. They would all require the opening of a file. Some would involve actions that took place within the context of scouting. Some would be where young people may have made disclosures to a trusted scout leader of something that has happened at home or in school. The Deputy will understand that it happens. That is a file for us and we have a reporting responsibility. I, particularly, as chief executive officer, have a reporting responsibility.

The files are of quite a different nature to the pre-2003 ones and, as we go back to a period before those, with regard any professional involvement in the management of cases. We have seen the responsibility to retain those files from the old organisation for the purposes of statutory authorities such as An Garda Síochána and Tusla. They make good use of them when they need to but it has been on a case basis. That case the Deputy made about the worry of somebody being in scouting who should have been removed is really important. That was exactly the reason that we moved on this in 2012. I was five minutes behind the desk as chief executive officer six years ago when it was brought to my attention that a scouter had been removed from one of the old organisations in the early 1970s and had gained access to Scouting Ireland. He had been abstained and removed and we had to deal with that. I was faced with the worry at the time that there might have been others.

We brought back veteran staff from the old organisation who understood the files. They went through them with us in a systematic way. We traffic-lighted them as either red, amber or green, with red meaning that we had to act immediately, amber meaning that we had something to do but that it was not immediate and green meaning that everything was okay. Fortunately, we ended up with seven amber lights, but it had the limitation of being staff-led. We had no one with the expertise or insight of someone like Mr. Ian Elliott, but we engaged in that due diligence exercise at the time. We have since retained the files which are openly available to those bodies with statutory responsibility, particularly Tusla and An Garda Síochána. That is the case to this day.