Professor Jim Lucey:

May I take that question? The report gives a very detailed account. It contains an overview, as the Senator will be aware, and a detailed account of each of the nine CAMHS areas. There are variances across and within CAMHS areas. We can talk about the difficulties with a great deal of accuracy now. One of the great advances in Irish healthcare has been the arrival of an awareness of data. The data are there to show the degrees of variance. I do not wish now to call out in this chamber one particular CAMHS area over another. The report makes it very clear. The point is that there is variance.

The Senator mentioned delay. I would like to bring the committee's attention to one of the regulations and standards that we can apply to the centres we regulate. That is the code of practice on admission, transfer and discharge. It is a powerful mandate to which we can hold a centre in the adult context. It requires centres to engage with the community such that there is a response to need and the need is safely catered to with respect to transfers, and such that a discharge engages people with services in the community. No such code of practice exists in any CAMHS. We have no mandate to insist on that. While I recognise the Senator wants me to call out the different centres, and they are called out starkly in the report, I would like the committee to look to the solution with us. The solution is that we have such powers to insist, for example, on a code of practice for functional and expeditious assessment. We do not have such a power.