Mr. Pat Rabbitte:

I thank the Deputy. The short answer to the point on promotion and explaining Tusla to the public is that there is general agreement on that. The board was supportive of the idea. I raised it at the first meeting I had with the Minister and she certainly thinks that it is a very good idea that the public should know and have confidence in the organisation and that some of the good work the Deputy referred to should be put out there by us.

Having said what I said about HIQA, and how somebody must invigilate standards and best practice, some of the HIQA material I have seen is very high quality as to rigour and so on, but by definition it is a fault-finding exercise. When the report comes out, one will find laid out very simply what the problems, deficiencies and non-compliance are. It is very easy to promote such material. There is rarely a pat on the head or an acknowledgement of the very many good things that are going on at the same time.

I agree with Deputy Mitchell that that should be done.

Unless the Deputy has a particular point to make on it, I would like to think that kind of internal review is going on all of the time. I have said to the board that in my experience I have never seen a more prescriptive piece of legislation than the statute that establishes Tusla. That reflects the circumstances in which it was born, and some of the high profile material that came into the public domain. It is hugely prescriptive and piled on top of that are several mechanisms of oversight. We have been discussing, for example, the expert advisory group. It seems to me, on balance, that it has been helpful because it has put a focus on that particular area and it has driven the agency to respond. The scale of oversight includes oversight agreements with the Department, protocols on this, memoranda of understanding on that, the expert advisory group, HIQA, performance statements, interaction with the Department, regular meetings with the Minister, structured meetings with the Minister meeting the board, and appearances before the Oireachtas committee. Any one of those could be very good on its own, but sometimes I wonder whether more is less and if the senior management can afford to apply itself to the job it should be doing. One cannot relegate the preparation of reports for the Department, the Minister, the Oireachtas committee or whomsoever to junior staff. It has to be done by the senior staff. We should be careful that we do not take away from what is their primary duty, namely, to drive change management and implement the matters that are now in the public domain. It is not that we do not know what needs to be done better, but it is having the time to cause it to happen.

Culture is a very difficult thing to tackle in any organisation. We have an inherited culture. There probably are people who say they have been doing this for 25 years and they know how it should be done, and they do not care how it is done in some other region. There is a culture there and, as Deputy Rabbitte said, times have changed. We need to confront that. Only senior management can drive that change programme.