Mr. Pat Bergin:

I will start with the handcuff issue. They are not used on the campus. The children are not handcuffed when going to school. There is free movement around the campus as the young people move around with staff, so there are no handcuffs. I believe that in the last 12 months there have been four occasions when handcuffs have been approved for use by a deputy director or myself with regard to the movement of a young person. This was because of the level of risk they posed. I shall give an example rather than a specific incident. If a staff member is moving a young person from one side of the campus to the other and there is a concern that he or she is going to act out, then we have an agreement with them. My concern is that if a person is acting out we cannot really put handcuffs on them. The capacity to put handcuffs on a person while they are acting out does not sit well with me.

I did not mean to come across as disingenuous with the comment around children arriving to the campus in handcuffs. The point I was trying to allude to was that once they arrive, the majority of the young people are in handcuffs, the handcuffs are removed from them and they do not use handcuffs again. The challenge arises when we do need to use handcuffs when we take the young person off campus. Previously, all young people who went off campus had handcuffs. We have changed that practice based on the assessment of risk. If a young person is out on permitted absence - going out for the day with family and so on - and if he is due in court two weeks later I do not expect to see that young man going to court in handcuffs.

However, the challenge is the risks associated with that because if he runs away, I will be asked what I was doing to prevent him from running away. Handcuffs are rarely used on campus and only in exceptional circumstances.

There is a significant challenge on the campus regarding records. This is a historical issue and when I say we are nearly there, I mean there have been different practices around recording as people did not record or see the need to do so. We try to explain to people that the more they record, the better, because records provide us with insight, information and accountability. Record keeping is improving substantially.

On single separation, every morning one of my deputy directors visits each of the units and asks which young persons are in single separation, why they are there and what is being done. They then check the position and records are also checked. Rather than leaving this to managers in units and members of the staff team, we have brought this up a level. We have decided to change practice and improve awareness of what is being done. We challenge staff by asking why Tommy is still in his room and has not been moved on and what is the story with him. This is challenging for everybody because if Tommy is moved on and something goes wrong an hour later, we will have moved him too soon and before he was ready to be independent or make decisions. These are the risks and challenges we face daily. Everybody is different and the important issue for me is that we look at the individual rather than a routine piece.

The issue of cultural needs was raised. The number of young people on campus who come from a Traveller background is significant. Many of the young people who come in do not want to be identified as being from a Traveller background. When they get to the point of mobility and going off campus they are involved in projects outside the campus that are focused on their background. There is a challenge around bringing people into the campus and how one designs particular programmes. What we do in this regard is around placement planning. Any professional and any link that is known to the young person in question becomes part of his planning process. The young persons attends meetings to find out what they can do and deliver and, where he or she is moving home or into the community, what is the contact. The work of Youth Advocate Programmes Ireland, YAP, and Le Chéile involves identifying and matching particular supports in the community with young people on the campus. This considers ethnic background and links. We want to try to maintain this. We have looked at what mentors are best suited for families and children. This is an ongoing piece of development.