Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I thank the Chairman for hosting the meeting and guiding us. I will deal with the question on financial penalties and hand over to my colleague on HIQA. I struggled with putting the financial penalty into the recommendations because I felt it was such a draconian old-fashioned way of doing things, whereby we have to use a stick to get some sort of compliance in moving forward. However, if that is the way we have to do it, and we find we are paying penalties of X million euro every year instead of diverting those millions to making the system work, that is fine if it is what we need to do for a certain period of time but it is a shame that we even have to think that way. From our point of view we should be well past that. We should be progressive. We should be thinking about the future. We should be future-proofing these systems. There should be no question as to whether a child will get what he or she needs in the time set out in the legislative books. As I said previously, instead of spending money to fight parents who go to the High Court just to get an assessment of need in the time the law says it should take place, we should divert the money to creating resources and funding them. If the financial penalty works I will be delighted. It would be a shame if it does work but anything that moves things forward and makes it less intractable would be a positive. I will hand over to my colleague, Dr. McAuley, to discuss HIQA and give an outline on it.