Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I thank Senator Flynn for her kind words. We appreciate her coming to join us here today. Who is held accountable is a fantastic question. For me, it is the legislators. As the Senator mentioned, and I referenced it too, we deliberately crafted our statement to show that we followed up Ivy's case in 2023, which we first originally highlighted in 2017. The special report on direct provision was published last year but we first reported in 2021. Nowhere to Turn was a follow-up report on a 2020 case - Jack's case - about children being left in hospital. We follow up, we chase and we get promises. Let us take the scoliosis issue, the Ivy case and the scoliosis report we did in 2017. The Minister, Deputy Donnelly, gave €19 million to CHI on the promise it would bring down the waiting list from four months to lower, but he is now having to audit that. I hold the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, accountable and he is now trying to hold CHI accountable. I do not know where the accountability is going to end but all I know is that the children are losing out every single time. If I had been told in 2017 that we were going to invest €19 million in the hospital, I would have thought that would sort it all out. That is the reason we did the report. We had been getting these complaints since 2012, when I joined the office, but we could not do anything.

We asked for a five-year plan to sort it out. We were not trying to force anyone to fix it quickly but asking that it be fixed so that it never has to come up again. That is what 2017 was about. They spent 18 months working on it, brought in the parents and made it work. They got to a certain stage where there was a co-produced plan but it fell down again because CHI and the parents fell out and it did not get followed through. The Minister at that time, whoever it was, did not follow through at different stages.

Who is held accountable? It is the Department and the Government. What I keep hearing at different levels and at different stages, regardless of the issue, is that, ultimately, it comes down to finance. If people are going to fight then instead of fighting my office and fighting children and their parents in the courts, they should fight the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform. Let them make that the fight they want to take on as politicians and Ministers. They are spending too much time and energy fighting parents who are only looking out for the best interests of their child instead of fighting internally, standing up for their Departments and standing up for the children they serve.

Who are the customers here? The customers are the children. If I am the Department of Education, the customer is not the unions, it is not the teachers, it is not the boards of management, it is not even the parents, it is the child I serve. Too many politicians and high-level civil servants have lost sight of that and that is what we need to get to. We need to get back to that, and if we are coming into a new Government and if anybody is creating manifestos and asking what we want to do, we want to see a Civil Service, public service and political service that works on behalf of their customer, which is, from our point of view, the child.