Results 121-140 of 1,342 for speaker:James Geoghegan

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: Is Tusla worried and anxious that other missing children who have not as yet been identified as missing will now be identified as a result of this review?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: What is frightening to me - I say this as a parent of three kids - and the public is that, only in June, the chair of Tusla, writing in the foreword of the annual report, said that after ten years, the agency had never been better equipped to meet the complex challenges rushing towards it. How does that statement stack up with what is now being carried out? Ms Duggan did not say it...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: I do not mean for this to be provocative but is there an acceptable level of missing children? Surely that is the worst possible outcome when it comes to the care of children, that the children themselves go missing. Is there anything worse?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: How then could it have been said in a report only a couple of months ago that we were in the best place we had been for the past ten years? Ms Duggan sees how it is difficult to understand or reconcile those two statements and the reality of what we are seeing.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: I want to bring Ms Duggan to the four cases the Comptroller and Auditor General highlighted in his report on page 24. Ms Duggan will be familiar with those cases as they have been summarised. They all related to certain events that commenced in 2015. Is that right?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: Did those events relate to missing children?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: What did those events relate to?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: Is Ms Duggan in a position to furnish to this committee those High Court orders in each of those cases?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: May I make that request on behalf of the committee?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: On the third case, I acknowledge what Ms Duggan has said about being bound by a court order - I am not asking her to break that - but it was obviously an extremely serious issue that arose. Tusla carried out an external agency report, which cost it over €400,000. The report was subsequently quashed by the High Court. Somebody went to the High Court and said whatever was in that...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: I just have eight seconds.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: For the avoidance of all doubt, there are no circumstances in which Ms Duggan can say, regarding any of the orders or settlement agreements she was a participant in for these four cases, anything more than that these were service issues. Is that the absolute maximum she is permitted to tell the committee about those cases? She cannot say anything more than "service issues".

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: That is in respect of all four cases.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: I will follow on from the Chair's line of questioning. Am I to take it from what Ms Duggan said that the reason Tusla has not reached the target of 110 special care beds is because there is a new obligation in respect of 528 children in IPAS accommodation?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: I appreciate that Ms Duggan is going to put on notice, in respect of all the four parties, her intent to provide to this committee the court orders in those four cases. That is if I understand what has been said here correctly. Ms Duggan mentioned the 15 cases that were settled this year. In passing, she said they were not to staff. Am I to take it that what she meant is that the four...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: So they relate to staff members in Tusla. In terms of the decision not to disclose anything related to these four cases, who looked for that? Was it in Tusla's interest or in the interests of the claimants not to disclose anything to do with these cases?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: There was one other thing Ms Duggan said that really surprised me. She said that they managed to mediate the costs effectively in the end. Is Ms Duggan really saying that?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: But given the €49,999, and when balanced against €800,000 in legal costs and a €400,000 report, how could anyone say that the process was mediated successfully?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: Why did it take Ms Duggan to come in to make the decision? What went wrong here? How did Tusla allow this to go on for seven years to the point where over €1.2 million was spent on lawyers dealing with something that when Ms Duggan came in as CEO she said "Ah lads, we have got to sort this out, let us get this done"? Were there rows going on at a senior level about this? What were...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2024: Tusla - the Child and Family Agency (2 Oct 2025)

James Geoghegan: There are very few cases, and one could probably count them on one hand, where the amount of damages awarded would be €50,000 and the legal costs associated with the case will be €800,000. It is very few. Something terrible went wrong here. It is very regrettable. The witness mentioned transparency at the outset and it is very regrettable from our perspective, and that of...