Mr. Vivian Geiran:

I want to respond to a couple of the general questions and then I will ask Ms O'Connor to deal with the specific one on social work. So many of the issues and questions that have been raised overlap in a lot of areas. As Professor Kelly pointed out, the issues around recruitment within the medical profession are echoed across other sectors of the health and social care professional groups, and specifically for social workers in our case. There is a national shortage. Looking at the pool of social workers engaged in the various areas in which we work, collectively there is a shortage in Ireland. There are two issues in relation to that. When initiatives such as new legislation, like we are talking about here, new policies and structures are being considered, we need to bear in mind that there is not a national social work strategy in Ireland. There is not a plan for how Government policies will be implemented and delivered where they depend on social workers and where social workers will have to be in place to do that. There is not a social work strategy or a social work workforce plan at a national level, which needs to be in place.

With regard to strengthening the legislation, there is widespread agreement on the need for adult safeguarding legislation. The Deputy asked how that would help. There are so many ways, which we have included in our written submission. To add to that, in our history to date we have operated a light-touch approach to adult safeguarding in Ireland. As has been said already, the approach in terms of services and structures is also extremely siloed. The legislation we implement in this area should not be siloed because, as Professor Kelly and others have pointed out, it needs to dovetail and connect with the assisted decision-making legislation, and legislation relating to child protection, domestic violence and mental health. Too often we end up with legislation and structures that do not communicate or talk with each other. We have a long and not very positive history of institutionalisation in Ireland. Professor Kelly referred to the history of huge numbers in psychiatric institutions. At that time, we had a couple of hundred people in prisons. As one figure went dramatically down, the other went dramatically up. That gap or nexus between the criminal justice system and mental health services is clear and is further evidence of the need to join up the various elements that currently operate in too much of a silo, unfortunately. I will ask Ms O'Connor to address the question on how social workers can and do respond to complaints.