Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome Ms O'Keeffe, Mr. Clonan and all the other witnesses. This is my first opportunity to say this following the report on the crash of R116. I add my voice to the condolences for Dara Fitzpatrick, Mark Duffy, Paul Ormsby and Ciarán Smith. I would also add my voice to those condolences for Caitríona Lucas. That just shows the nature of the work the Coast Guard does and its importance. As for the report, there obviously needs to be follow-through on those recommendations. Beyond that, we need to look into those protocols and how we operate in regard to catching mistakes, particularly those mistakes that were mentioned earlier about the air navigation difficulties.

We are dealing with this situation. I do not want to repeat what has been said and even if we do not get into the rights and wrongs of it, if we are talking about Doolin it would be fair to surmise that we are here on the basis of what was at least a HR failure. We can talk about the rights and wrongs of the new organisation, the ICGVRA - it does not exactly roll off the tongue - and we can talk about CUAG and whether its terms of reference mean it is a representative organisation. It is fair to say, however, that a significant number of people have been in contact with all of us who do not believe it is at this point in time. There has been a systems failure and a communications failure and an inability to deal with these HR issues.

Mr. Clonan stated himself there have been failures and difficulties over the years, even in Doolin. We all accept Kieran Mulvey has been appointed and that he has a difficult piece of work to do which he needs to work through, but what we need to get from that work are learnings on how we operate into the future. Some of the material that has been put into the public domain and in front of us concerns not only those HR issues and difficulties. Obviously, there is the material relating to R116. The question is whether we have the ability not only to have a fit-for-purpose system to deal with the three areas of search and rescue, maritime casualty and pollution response, but beyond that, a system that is fit to check and catch mistakes as they happen.

Sometimes an analogy is made with the airline industry, which was bad for many years. The industry discovered the best approach was to create almost an amnesty for those who had been involved in near collisions or whatever so that they could come forward with the information, from which learnings could be made, protocols could be changed and the system could be made better. Sometimes we look for a head when it is already too late. We need a system that will catch mistakes, will give us the best bang for our buck, and one that is about saving lives. Will Mr. Clonan comment on that?

Mr. Clonan spoke about audits. I was going to ask if there is a need for an audit across the board to ensure we have a system that is fit for purpose and has the protocols in place for catching HR and safety issues. Mr. Clonan spoke about ongoing audits. Will he provide some more information on that?