Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Tyndall, Mr. Garvey and Ms Joyce. I have a question for Mr. Tyndall about unaccompanied visits, which I welcome. In my last position, I was an advocate for mental health services. The unannounced visits seem to bear more fruit. I agree about the number of complaints before Covid compared with now. I am well aware of that because I have been speaking with NGOs and people in the centres. The White Paper is substantial, with more than 170 pages. There is a lot in it. I hope it is not only aspirational. I welcome the movement from the private sector to NGOs. It should work better since it seems to be more empathetic, with people who are in it for the job and not for the profit, so profit does not drive things.

The witnesses mentioned the complaints mechanism, specifically in the direct provision update for 2020. Regarding mental health, many people who enter direct provision are quite possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, because they have come from conflict of one kind of another. My worry relates to the overlapping issues of when they come in, from feeling unsafe to an environment where they are afraid to complain or, worse still, they are afraid to ask for help because it puts extra pressure on management or staff and they are dismissive. It is a problem. I have been dealing with a number of cases where people have been hospitalised as a result of mental health issues and they have been penalised when they have come back into the direct provision setting. I am dealing with one or two at the moment. How do I get that complaints mechanism to assist those people?

Mr. Garvey spoke about another matter. In many cases, we find that a common sense approach seems to be lacking. If a couple is together but they are not together, with one in the community, the obvious thing is to make them a family unit. It progresses everything. How does one move that on?

There is a final matter I want to address. The witnesses touched on the matter of work, driver licences and social protection, the fact different families should not be living in the same rooms and cooking facilities, which are all niggling problems. There is possibly much anger as people are saying that while these people can be moved out of enclosed conditions into communal living, we cannot afford to put our own people into social housing. How does one find where the balance lies, and I will not say for selling it? I have seen Government reports and they have been shelved. It all sounds great on paper and it is a great plan but nothing is driving it. I am excited about the power the witnesses' office has. It is great to engage with the Ombudsman because there must be more of this and more collaboration. We are here today to try to do the right thing. Let us be realistic in that we will not sort everything out overnight but how can we address the main concerns when people come from a difficult situation and are dropped in to another difficult situation but are not in a position to tell the truth?

As mentioned, Zoom is not the same as person-to-person contact. One cannot read people's faces or the emotions in their eyes, whether they are telling the truth or whether they want to tell more. Is there a plan to accelerate that? I know there is much in it but I did not want to miss the opportunity to get this across. There are great people working here, such as the NGOs, which are brilliant and are volunteers in the centres. They want to do the right thing but when they come to us for help, we are stuck. They cannot go to management because management might be involved or to the corporate body because this gang is involved in it. Is there a direct route to the Ombudsman or to the Garda Síochána? If one involves the Garda Síochána, that escalates the problem again. Are the people punished for that? We will not mention protected disclosures because that is another box of frogs, as I call it. It sounds great until one gets to the final point and then one cannot check to see if it is resolved. Is there an endpoint for safeguarding everybody when it comes to these kinds of complaints? I know I raised a lot of issues and I apologise.