Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have the most serious concerns about what is happening. I have no concerns about the judge, and I ask the Minister not to waste my time telling me how good she is. I know the judge, and that goes without saying. My difficulty relates to setting up an independent review with no power and no terms of reference published, and the terms we know about from the Minister's press release beggar belief. I refer to the suggestion the review will examine strategies and policies that have utterly failed. That is an insult.

The press release indicates that witnesses can come forward. We saw how witnesses came forward to the formal commission of inquiry and all the problems that entailed. How will witnesses' testimony be treated when they come forward? Will their experiences be recorded? Will they be quoted in the report and so on? That was missing from the press release. Where are the terms of reference and who has had an input into them? Can we see what they are and return to them? A review with no statutory authority is being set up and Deputies are standing up and saying we need urgent action, but the urgent action has never happened. There is a litany of utter failure by the system and the governance that are there. We want to know why that happened, not to look at idiotic policies that were never enforced. Why and how did this happen?

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