Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The Minister for Transport did refer to ten cases of death by natural causes. I examined the details of those cases and one of them was a suicide from 2000. I am not comfortable with describing that as natural causes although it was furnished to me in that fashion. It dates back to 2000 so it would not be appropriate.

There is a lack of therapeutic interventions. I did not set child protection as a priority in my ministry for nothing; I did it because there are gaps and, in some cases, duplication. To characterise the response of the Government today as inertia is very unfair. No comment was made about the implementation plan on the Ryan report except to criticise it because the timelines were not ambitious enough. Every child protection agency in the State welcomed the implementation plan and welcomed the very ambitious timelines contained in it. They welcomed the fact that we are committed to providing extra therapeutic interventions and that we are going to deal with multi-disciplinary assessment of people in special care, high support and residential care. They welcome that fact that in the budget for 2010 - and let us be honest it was against the head in terms of existing resources - €15 million was provided by the Minister for Finance to ensure that the implementation plan would be enacted.

Deputy Reilly asked about Ballydowd. The new assistant national director, who was on the radio this morning, has a very clear view of what he wants to do with special care and high support, which is about co-location. I agree with Deputy Jan O'Sullivan that we need a fuller debate on these issues. They are worth that and certainly worth as much time as the House can afford to give this important subject in the future.

I cannot anticipate a timeline for publication. I must reiterate that these are delicate issues. I had a discussion with Lord Laming in the UK following the Baby P and the Victoria Climbie cases and the same problem arises there with regard to putting reports in the public domain because of the difficult exercise of balancing the absolute right of the public to know and have a window into our child welfare and protection service and the interests of health professionals who co-operate with inquiries and the families of the unfortunate victims.

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