Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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We will print that. There is so much there, we may have missed it.

The next item is No. 1397. I want to deal with this broad issue. It is from Robert Watt about protected disclosures. This committee has people coming to us with protected disclosures. The committee probably needs to take a bit of time to consider how we deal with these. We have had them from justice, education, and third level institutions. They are coming from a variety of sources. Rather than deal with each one on an ad hoc basis, telling one person to go here and another to go there, we, as a committee need to get a briefing on how we will handle all these in a consistent manner. The final paragraph of his circular to us, Robert Watts states:

the Protected Disclosure Act is subject to statutory review, which is almost complete and will be published shortly. This will review the operation of the Act since its commencement in July 2014 and has included a public consultation process in which 25 submissions were received ... A report will be made by the Minister to each House of the Oireachtas by early July on the findings of the review and conclusions drawn from those findings.

According to the Secretary General, there will be a report on how the Act is operating in the next week or so. We know there are serious deficiencies and inconsistencies all over the place in public bodies. We have a group of protected disclosures before us and we might set aside an hour to deal with them together rather than dealing with each one. That is only a suggestion but I want to be sure that we are dealing with them properly.

I do not want to be accused of dealing with one in one way and another in a different way. I am not trying to rule anything out; I just want to be comprehensive in what I am doing.