Mr. Eoin O'Sullivan:

At the start of this month, the board had a meeting and various stakeholders were invited. The meeting was recorded and is available online. The board spoke about its processing and the progress made up to this point. Previous to that, the last meeting was in December 2022. Again, that meeting was made available online. The board is consulting with the various accrediting bodies and stakeholders. It is clear now, though, that being a member of an accrediting body is not actually going to make any difference to becoming a registrant of the counselling or psychotherapy boards. What they will be looking at are qualifications. This is creating this strange time where people are desirous of being accredited and having the security and recognition that would give them, while also knowing that in a couple of years this is going to be a matter of legislation. People will then be registered practitioners and not accredited practitioners. There are people, therefore, in the industry who are wondering why they are paying their registration fees.

There is risk in this because being a member of an accrediting body provides an ethical framework for how to work with clients. There is also a complaints procedure. If a client were to be unhappy with a service I provide, then he or she could go to my accrediting body and lodge a complaint. The accrediting body would then investigate, speak to me about the complaint and sanction me if necessary. The longer this situation goes on, the more there will be this strange time where we are kind of left in the wind.