Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 December 2020

Public Accounts Committee

2019 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 21 - Prisons
Chapter 7 – Catering and Ancillary Services in Prisons

11:30 am

Ms Caron McCaffrey:

We take the confidentiality of our processes very seriously. We have a full-time protected disclosures manager. This is the person who engages individually.

The name of the discloser is not disclosed outside of the process. I do not see protected disclosures when they come in. The only sight I have is of the high level summary where an investigation has been completed. Where recommendations are made, those recommendations are brought to my attention to ensure they are fully implemented. There is full confidentiality within those processes. We take it very seriously. It does mean we are not in a position to discuss individual cases because we have an obligation under our own policy and under the Act to protect the identity of the discloser and to ensure we do not provide information of a disclosure that could lead to a person being identified and I take that obligation very seriously.