Dr. John Lawlor:

I thank the Deputy. I am grateful for her question because this matter does need to be cleared up. In terms of the terminology, and Mr. Elliott referred to the importance of terminology, child protection was the common term, probably up until we started to see the emergence of discussions around Children First. We had somebody employed directly as a professional in that area up to the summer of 2017. We then engaged Mr. Elliott immediately for the purpose of overseeing what we did and to provide the interim cover as the interim safeguarding manager, as he has been referred to. He has provided professional guidance and support to our team since then.

In regard to our team, they are trained. They are vastly experienced. They have dealt with very many cases in their time and they have done so with the benefit of Mr. Elliott's guidance and supervision since the summer of 2017. There was no gap in trained people to deal with this. It was quite obvious to us that the model of having a single child protection officer in an organisation of our scale was inappropriate given the scale and the complexity of the work that was involved. We realised we needed to move to a new model and Mr. Elliott has been hugely helpful in framing what that would look like.

Of course, we have the challenge of funding, which has been alluded to a number of times in the meeting, but notwithstanding that we have retained a professional team managed by the finest safeguarding expert, if he does not mind me saying so, in these islands who has had oversight of all cases since and has overseen the practice of our professional team. Our professional team are qualified and trained in the sector.