Dr. John Lawlor:

I took office in March 2012 and I actioned the 2012 review in July 2012. I did so because I was deeply concerned at the emergence of a situation where somebody who had been removed from a legacy organisation in 1972 had gained access to Scouting Ireland. That happened as a result of the change from a paper-based system to databases. Once we had that information the person was immediately removed but I had a concern there may be other such situations. It was prudent and correct to investigate that and so it was not just a scoping exercise. As Mr. Tennant said, the primary consideration was to find out if we had anybody in this organisation who should not have been there. Deputy Funchion rightly pointed to that concern. We had to convince ourselves there was nobody in the organisation who should not have been there. We also wanted to make sure we were up to date with reporting on these issues. I know Deputy Sherlock has referenced minutes and I do not know what fragment of correspondence he has but there is extensive correspondence between the safeguarding team of the time and the statutory agencies about the work that was done and about what needed to be done. The follow-on work was done, the reporting was done and subsequent to 2012, the files were made available to and accessed again by both agencies, particularly An Garda Síochána and the PSNI in relation to criminal prosecutions. The cataloguing that was done was important because it made it easier for those agencies to access the information. What might have caused the confusion with the reference to Mount Melleray is that the only files we had there were census records so where we had a question on whether an individual was in the scouts in 1972, for example, we would have to go and check the old census records. However, as Mr. Tennant said, the safeguarding files were always maintained in Larch Hill and from the inception of Scouting Ireland they were always made available to the statutory agencies for their investigations.