Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Nobody is suggesting that the vast bulk of facilities are beyond reproach. Let us nail that to the mast. That is self-evident because we have relationships in our constituencies with childcare facilities and they are excellent. I have a lot of sympathy for what I would call junior staff, as opposed to management staff, who are working under duress in some instances in these facilities. However, there is a systemic failure somewhere because if there was not, we would not be sitting here today and we would not have witnessed the scenes we witnessed on the RTÉ programme. What I am trying to do is nail down where the obligations lie. There are obligations regarding mandatory reporting and there seems to have been a failure somewhere in that respect and we need to address that failure. Similarly, parents listening to this discussion will hear some sympathetic language about improving the quality of the conversation with parents and involving them more in respect of policy and so on. However, if a parent who sent his or her child to one of these creches today had an inkling that something was going on, he or she will not go to the Tusla website or the Department of Children and Youth Affairs website to check the criteria. They would not necessarily act on their instinct because they have trust that the regulatory regime is robust enough to ensure their child is protected. That is a failure in the system. As mentioned by other speakers, we need to get to a point now, arising from this episode, where parents are given power on a statutory basis to be part of a communications set-up, so to speak, with whatever facility their child happens to be in or attending in a way that ensures there is proper communication with them because they are being left out of the loop. I repeat that parents are racked with guilt. I am a parent. I was racked with guilt watching that programme. One could not but be racked with guilt. Parents already feel guilty sending their children to childcare daily, given the society we live in where the two parents have to work. We will have an opportunity to address and engage with the academics about whom Ms McNally spoke because it is our intention to have a second committee hearing, for which I thank the Chairman, to which those academics will be invited because it is important that we kick the tyres, so to speak, in respect of what the witnesses are telling us and have a robust discussion. We will need to hear from parents also in respect of what we are hearing today.

I want to drill down into the programme. Obviously, the people working undercover made representations, disclosures or notified Tusla. I am concerned that too much time elapsed between the notification by those undercover workers and the lack of communication with parents such that some parents were not notified other than via RTÉ. Nobody is blaming RTÉ. It has done a public service on this issue. However, the parents want to know why Tusla did not phone them to notify them this was going on and if they could be given a guarantee that their child will be safe in the intervening period. That is the bottom line.