Dr. John Lawlor:

As Deputy Rabbitte will know, we provided the numbers extensively to the committee and to her. The 995 figure is the number of files held up to March 2019. They are inclusive of all the old Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland, CBSI, files; all the old Scout Association of Ireland, SAI, files; the Scouting Ireland files, so any file opened by Scouting Ireland from 2003 up to 29 March 2019; and, also what came in on the helpline. It is the totality of those files.

The files that were reviewed in 2012 were the CBSI and SIA files - the legacy files - and the files opened in the interim had to be added to that. In an organisation of the scale of Scouting Ireland, files will inevitably be opened and we need an extensive safeguarding team because of the concerns, issues and cases that arise. While they are different from what arose 30 or 40 years ago, they are no less worthy of a professional response. As I stated at a previous meeting of the committee, we open approximately 70 files per year, and they accumulate all the time. As Mr. Ian Elliott commented in one of his earlier reports, it is a sign of the health of the organisation when we receive more reports. One of the problems that have dogged the country is the lack of reporting. We encourage and want people to report, and see it as a healthy sign if we receive more reports.

The total number up to March was 995. Mr. Begley can speak to this year's work if it is helpful to the Deputy. The figure includes all the old files, that is, the 345 the Deputy mentioned, comprising CBSI and SAI, and the Scouting Ireland files and what we received from the helpline that opened in November last year.