Mr. Ronan Cavanagh:

No problem at all. Obviously, Garda figures on crime have come out. The issue I was referring to is that, on the one hand, there are HSE safeguarding office figures that report annually on cases of alleged abuse, which are broken down into the different categories I referred to earlier, such as online abuse, emotional abuse or psychological abuse, which are the main types.

On the Garda figures, what we promote is that if there is an immediate or serious safeguarding concern, that person would go to the Garda, while if there is an ongoing, complex familial situation, that it go to the social work service in the HSE. What we are unable to do is have parallel reporting of information such that we could join the Garda and the HSE figures. They are different sets of figures, really, and how they are recorded and what they signify are different. That again leads to the point we are making that to get an overall picture of the level of abuse, if collecting in an overall sense was under the jurisdiction of the Safeguarding Authority, then we would get a picture of the level of abuse in the different categories overall. We would be able to monitor over time as to the changes and what areas legislation or enforcement should focus on. Trying to gather information in an overall sense would be where we would like things to be going.