Ms Kate Duggan:

As Mr. Hone referenced, in the early stages of the significant influx in the context of global movement and people coming here from Ukraine, we were challenged on the assessment piece. We assess eligibility in the context of childcare services and the Child Care Act. We wanted to work with stakeholders. There were legal challenges to some of our findings. We worked with the various stakeholders to make sure of certain things in the absence of an objective assessment around age. In other countries, there are more objective assessments that involve medical examinations. The role of the Department of justice and the International Protection Office, which comes under the remit of the Department, involves looking at documentation, information on point of entry and all of that. Where a young person indicates they are a minor or where they are believed to be a minor, they are referred to us. We are operating on the basis of subjective analysis in this regard. It is in the context of the balance between making sure no child is taken into IPAS services and the risk of this that we apply the principle and benefit of that. This also creates a risk we have to manage to make sure, when applying the principle and benefit of being a minor, that no potential adult is housed with children.

Our team has an extraordinary amount of work to do in terms of perhaps having to decide to put a young person to whom we are applying the principle of the benefit of age into a single-occupancy unit because we could not risk putting him or her in with someone who is an adult, where we have any doubt around that.