Ms Bernie McNally:

The Deputy acknowledged that the additional powers allocated in 2016 were a significant enhancement of those previously in place. We have come a long way and ramped up a few gears. We have further to go, as the Minister, Deputy Zappone, acknowledged in recent days. The powers we will consider and on which we will liaise with Tusla and the Office of the Attorney General are for services which refuse to register. By law, services must register. We will examine whether it is appropriate to give Tusla more powers to act more quickly regarding unregistered services, rather than having to go through due process, which may be very lengthy.

That is probably the easier of the powers because the next power we want to look at is where a service has been already registered but Tusla finds a level of poor practice that is absolutely unacceptable. Let us face it, there are scenarios where services are doing their very best but fail with some of their standards, despite their very best efforts. I am not talking about scenarios such as that, where we know they want to and will improve given a little bit of time. Where Tusla finds that the standard is so concerning and the owner of the service has given no assurances of immediate action to address it, we will look to give Tusla the powers to close those services down immediately.

Again, in our conversations with Tusla, it is clear it does not imagine this would happen very often. It would be a power that is used quite infrequently but we are looking to grant such powers.

The other power we talked about this morning stems form the question of when Tusla can tell parents more. Due process does not exist to protect Tusla but to give the services the right to correct any inaccuracies that they might believe Tusla made in its inspection. It is about giving providers the opportunity to defend themselves, their reputations and livelihoods but it is also to ensure there will be no prejudice in the case of legal proceedings. This will be a challenge and is one that other sectors also face. What is the earliest point at which we can tell parents more? We want to but we must respect providers and the law. We will look at amendments over the next number of months as to what we can do in that space.