Mr. Finbarr Colfer:

There are 1,420 designated centres operating in Ireland. In terms of voluntary and State-provided services, the HSE operates 162 of those centres directly and funds the rest. There are 734 centres operating under section 38 of the Health Act 2004 while 524 are operating under section 39 of the Act.

Ms Grogan is correct. We have reverted to primarily conducting inspections on an unannounced basis and 80% of our inspections this year to date have been unannounced. During those inspections, we look at safeguarding in the fullest sense of that term in terms of people's rights and quality of life and any allegations or suspicions of abuse and how they have been responded to. Where we find inadequate arrangements, we use our regulatory powers to require providers to address those issues. Where providers fail to do that, we take further escalated action where we specify what providers need to do and give them a timeframe to do that. If there is a significant level of risk to residents, we give consideration to cancelling registration. We are very careful about taking that action because cancelling registration of a centre causes a lot of distress for people living in the centre and people who are important in their lives like their families. It is an action we take very carefully. In 2021, we cancelled the registration of two designated centres because we were not satisfied that the provider was addressing the safeguarding issues for residents. In most of the situations we encounter, providers do take successful action to address the issues we identify. Since 2013, whenever we commenced registration and inspection, there was an ongoing incremental improvement in safeguarding in centres. It is still something we monitor and observe. Last year, out of 1,420 centres, we carried out 1,220 inspections. In community-based services, we found a 7% rate were non-compliant with regarding to safeguarding arrangements while in congregated settings, the non-compliance rate when it came to protecting residents from abuse was 16%.