Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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I will reinforce the point made by Deputy Clare Daly. Correspondence was made available on 13 November 2017 as a result of a freedom of information request. The board had received legal advice on 13 March 2017. The correspondence is from a principal officer, who I will not name, in the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. It stated that the Department was of the view that the following are mechanisms to progress matters in order to ensure that the matters raised by the board were addressed. This is the independent legal advice. There follows a set of proposals. The first was a response to the authors of the report pointing out the existence of concerns about fair procedures and suggesting a further process of engagement with staff and management of Oberstown in order to ensure that persons criticised in the report had been fairly heard. Alternatively, the board of management of Oberstown campus could make a submission on behalf of the persons criticised in the report to be disclosed to HIQA and the joint Oireachtas committee along with the report. To reinforce Deputy Daly's point, members are very much of the view that everything was done to try to facilitate the board, either through further engagement with the authors of the report or through the legal mechanisms of the highest offices of the State, to publish the report, yet it refused to do so on the basis of its own independent legal advice. The arguments the witnesses are making do not hold water.