Professor Amanda Phelan:

Regarding the need, or not, for specific legislation, I would say it is within members’ gift to do this right and have specific legislation. There is precedence in terms of Colette Kelleher bringing a Bill in 2017 to set up a national adult safeguarding authority. We are seeing gaps and we want the responsibility to be solely within an organisation that will actually map and avoid all of those gaps. It will follow the person and co-ordinate that interdisciplinarity between, say, police, safeguarding teams, the legal system, front-line workers and all of that. That demands that we do it right and do the right thing, which is safeguarding the decision. Members will see the many facets of what could be incorporated in that in the Lower Reform Commission’s 2019 report, where it did a position paper on safeguarding and drew on the many aspects. What came up earlier was something as simple as sharing data, which is not permissible in what we do now. Therefore, we need to make sure that responding to safeguarding concerns is made as accessible as possible for professionals as well as people who are reporting that they are concerned about somebody else or perhaps reporting on a brother or sister who is not letting another sibling visit, because they are the gatekeeper. That is coercive control.

Coercive control has a huge impact because, again, as Ms O’Connor said earlier, much of this is about power control, and that power control can be between people out in the community, but also the power systems and dynamics that happen in the traditional systems of healthcare, where there are powerful people who are nurses, doctors or others who are coming and saying what needs to be done. We need to move away from that. We need bespoke legislation that firmly protects adults. It is not only about adults who are at risk now; we may all be at risk at some point of our lives. In fact, by doing that, everyone is being protected.