Mr. Jim Gibson:

In the development of trying to address significant referrals, particularly retrospectively, one region developed a specialist team in Dublin north east. That has influence and we have given a commitment in response to the HIQA statutory investigation that we would establish four regional teams. We are in the process of consultation and review of practice and methodology to come with a clear service delivery unit for this. There are other factors which also need to be taken into consideration, like our commitment, with An Garda Síochána, to identify social work staff to be very much involved in their protection units.

We are also developing a Barnahus model, the pilot project relating to which is established in Galway. It specifically looks at retrospective child sexual abuse. Those things are integrated. Ideally, we would have four regional teams to deal with the complex cases and the duty intake area teams will still be involved in low priority retrospective cases. It is important to note that a colleague who was a service improvement manager for retrospectives that we carried out a couple of years ago informed me that 70% of those referrals never got off the runway for us to deal with on the basis that we could not get follow up from the person who made the complaint.