Ms Oonagh Buckley:

I thank the Deputy for her question. From the get-go we knew that communicating with centre managers and the centre residents was going to be one of the biggest challenges we would have. We established a new team drawn from staff across the Department who volunteered for this work, and set up a system where firstly we rang every centre manager on a daily basis. We asked how things were progressing, and if there were things that they needed, for example PPE, or whatever. We were receiving direct information from centre managers.

We also started centre newsletters initially for centre managers, which were issued twice or three times a week. We then started doing one for centre residents which went out at least once a week, but sometimes more frequently than that. That provides a great deal of information, often in many languages, for the centre residents. We have multiple languages and people with multiple levels of capacity in languages in our centres, which is something we are very conscious of. We therefore tend to try to have as many communications as possible published in the major languages. I am sure we do not reach everybody every time. We will continue to do this and to keep pushing information into our centres.

One of the recent innovations which we asked centre managers to set up was for WhatsApp broadcasts for all of their residents. Broadcast is a more secure way of sending information out; it can be sent directly into the phones of residents as it comes through, which is done through constant efforts, reminding and reiteration. We also try to ensure that centre managers themselves are putting up appropriate signage, etc. We continue to do that on a daily basis.