Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Earlier on, Deputy Sherlock asked a question, and it is the same question that has gone around for the last number of months and years. From figures circulating in the media, we note that 321 alleged victims and 247 alleged perpetrators have been identified. I would have contacted Scouting Ireland myself back in October out of pure and utter frustration, because we were waiting to find a slot for it to come before us. There were "Prime Time" programmes airing and everything else. I asked a number of questions. Scouting Ireland has definitely gone very corporate. I will say that for nothing, because my response came from Dubheasa Kelly, the information and communications manager of Scouting Ireland, to a number of questions I would have asked. I am sure Mr. Tennant is aware of all these questions and he has probably had sight of the response.

An interesting part of the response that I got was something I had not been aware of. We have all talked around the 321 alleged victims and the 247 alleged perpetrators. The questions I posed were: Is it known how many files are in existence and if so, how many? Will Mr. Elliott investigate/include these files and, if not, when will these files be investigated? The response to this was that as of 29 March 2019, Scouting Ireland's safeguarding department held 999 files. All these files were catalogued as described above. Earlier, when Scouting Ireland was asked about how many files were in Larch Hill in 2012, the answer was 332. My question today is how did the number of files increase from 332 to 995, which is a multiple of three since 2012. How did this come about?