Ms Éimear Fisher:

While the Minister has brought the attention of the strategic liaison committee to the recommendation for cultural change among the other recommendations, it must cascade from the top. While that committee is co-chaired by the chief executive officer of Tusla and the assistant commissioner of the Garda who is responsible for child protection, it has to cascade downwards. From a practical point of view, the assignment of a Tusla person to the Garda national child protection unit has been agreed by Tusla. The process in regard to that assignment is in train as we speak. The Garda national child protection unit is not currently in a position to take that person because it is fully engaged with training its own staff on mandatory reporting and the full commencement of the Children First Act. That person will be appointed within a matter of weeks. The date we have been given is the end of September. The process has to be gone through from the point view of job specification, what we expect of this person, how they will work and so on. Clarity is needed around that but even more so from the point of view of what the member said about the practical impact of people working together, follow-up and the facilitation of that.

The Garda is in the process of establishing specialist protective service units in each of the 28 Garda divisions. It has a vanguard of those units set up in four areas, two in Dublin and two in the rest of the country and it is proposing to roll those out further. Once they are rolled out and the effectiveness of them from the Garda point of view has been established, and there is a foundation in place, there is a view that there needs to be some discussion about how that needs to link properly and practically with Tusla. One option is whether a designated social worker needs to be embedded in the unit, but whether that is the right option and the right use of resources by Tusla is a question to be considered. It has not been precluded or totally decided at this stage, but from the point of view of the working of those units, the Garda is quite anxious to get them embedded and then to see how best to work together. That will clearly provide a facility for the follow-up that the member asked about.