Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I would like to speak on a number of issues. In regard to the Department of Education, we had all expected that it would bring forward legislation winding down Caranua. As yet, that has not happened. This matter will drag on until that happens. In the meantime, what happens to the files and can people have access to their records? I ask that the committee secretariat would check that with the Department.

The learnings from this process are important. One the key issues is that in the future compensation should be on a mandatory rather than voluntary basis. That compensation is not mandatory is part of the problem. In other scenarios, we saw the Department of Education take years to bring in the assets that were to fund some of the compensation schemes. There needs to be some learning as a consequence of this process, including how Caranua functioned. Other reasonable questions are who carried out the evaluation, and what were the terms of reference for it. There needs to be a degree of closure from our point of view. We need to be able to point to what did not work and what could work should something like this happen again.