Mr. Cormac Quinlan:

To add to the duty to co-operate piece, I have heard of something that was funded by the Department. The university in Galway recently produced a report, in 2021, examining the whole issue. It looked at the duty to co-operate across multiple jurisdictions. Some of its key findings are important. It saw that duty to co-operate as a fundamental building block in interagency co-operation. It recognised that but there are a number of other factors. It highlighted the need to support any legislative requirement of that. As the Department highlighted, it will require very clear statutory guidance that will support how people work together and significant awareness building about what people’s responsibilities are in that context. We may have to look at local and national structures that can support that; we may have to review existing protocols to strengthen them in that context; resources have been mentioned by colleagues; leadership and culture change within organisations as well, we have heard that already in terms of some of the challenges of that collective responsibility and the whole-of-government, all-agencies approach to children is going to be really important; joint training and learning to support people in working together because you can put people in the same room and ask them to work together but they do not always achieve that so they have to be supported in that. Then a key aspect is monitoring and evaluation that it is working.