Mr. Enda O'Neill:

Almost every Department is involved in some form or another. The driving licence situation is a good example. What often happens is that a person goes between one Department and another and there are ongoing discussions as to who has responsibility. There is no referee, nobody above that to decide. It requires a good deal of co-operation and these things can often take a very long time to resolve. That conversation is relevant to the inspectorate as well. HIQA has been mentioned but legislative change would be required and there would be resource implications. What we need is a new approach, an all-of-government approach to these issues. It is bigger than just the Department of Justice and Equality, whether one has a rapporteur, as suggested by Mr. Justice McMahon, or some other model where somebody can have a bird's eye view of the entire system. We do not have performance benchmarks or baseline indicators across each Department so that we can see what success looks like and whether progress has been made against the targets. That is a difficult conversation but is one that needs to happen. The standards have been agreed at departmental level so it needs to be signed off. It is envisaged that there will be a period of two years where the centres will be expected to come up to standard over that period before they become binding. That said, they have informed the tenders already to date, so many of the important aspects of the standards coming from the McMahon report have been incorporated as some of the requirements of the tenders already done to date.

While we have not had sight of the contracts with direct provision centres, because this is commercially sensitive information, they are made available after a number of years. I believe we did have an example. It is in the appendix in the working group report but the tender documents themselves contain quite a bit of detail in terms of the expectations of contractors and what is required.