Mr. Mark Toland:

I will deal with the last question first. The Garda Síochána underwent a sea change in 2016 in respect of specialisation, which we welcome. The Garda had taken the view that any Garda member had the skills to investigate the rape of a child, which is not a view we hold and is not good practice in any other police service. We are delighted the Garda is introducing a protective services unit in every Garda division. There are four in operation. They will be properly trained, form a specialist unit and be a single point of contact for other agencies, such as the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, and Tusla. We welcome this. We are a little worried they will not be rolled out quickly enough because there will still be occasions on which inexperienced Garda members are dealing with child sexual abuse investigations, which is not something we would like to see. We also found a gap in local interaction between senior Garda managers and senior Tusla mangers. That gap has now been plugged, and the Garda has now introduced a formal process locally in every area across Ireland, where senior managers will come together. We think this is a good thing.

Co-location, in some aspects of this, is very positive but it still should not be a barrier to better inter-agency working. Some progress has been made between the agencies but they still have a very inefficient process for making notifications. The Garda Síochána's notification system is paper-based. We want to see an electronic version, which would speed things up. We also found that the two agencies tend to make decisions separately. We would like to see more of a coming together with the professionals to make decisions about child protection cases so the case proceeds much more quickly. In other jurisdictions - I know the Garda Síochána and Tusla have visited the UK - there are some good models that could be adapted to work very well in Ireland. We are not prescriptive about the model, just the way in which the Garda would operate and deal with the most serious cases. It should deal with them much more quickly than it does.