Mr. Mark Toland:

When a serious crime takes place, such as child sexual abuse or the rape of a child, agencies need to come together to decide on the next steps to take, to share information and assess whether the child is in immediate need of protection. That is an occasion where the agencies need to physically come together. As the Garda member investigating the crime might be on night duty or might not be in a specialist unit, he or she is not always available to go to that meeting. Sometimes the investigating Garda member is not available and sometimes conversations take place on the phone. I think it is a commitment to the process that one physically turns up and something is lost if the people are not in the same room. People might have had a conversation over the phone but it is important that the agencies come together and for each agency to provide information that it has got on its systems about the family and the suspect.

We went to look at UK models. We went to Scotland and to the West Midlands - to Birmingham city centre - in the UK and while they operate slightly different systems, they are all co-located. A notification comes in that it is a serious case, it goes to a social worker, the social worker carries out an immediate assessment, and then the social worker arranges the meeting. We sat there and watched the meeting. The agencies are in the same location, they come together, they share their information and they make what I would call executive decisions. These are all trained personnel - a paediatrician, a highly trained police officer and a highly trained social worker. They predetermine what happens next such as whether the child will be medically examined or will be interviewed, the dates of those examinations and the interviews. This is all done before a police officer has been told that he or she has been told he or she is investigating the crime. So the police officer investigating is given the crime and already important things have been done. The process is just much quicker and more dynamic plus highly trained people make those decisions. That is a model that we really like. In Scotland, they do a similar thing but information is shared online at the start. Sharing data is a major barrier in Ireland but it did not seem to be a problem in the UK and Scotland, where they shared the data and willingly gave all of the information they had. We found reticence here about sharing data in the fear that it would be disclosed to a third party. We have recommended that this issue should be addressed.