Maria Corrigan (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State. He has spent a considerable part of his day in the House. This report was produced following an incredibly sad event. I extend my sympathies and condolences to the Dunne and O'Brien families. Every time the case is referred to on television or in the newspapers a particular photograph of the family is used. I find it difficult to look at that photograph as the faces of the two little girls in particular seem so full of hope, life and happiness. If I find it difficult, I can only imagine the upset, grief and distress caused to the members of the families when they see it.

So much of the report is blacked out that a discussion of it is of limited value. I accept the Minister of State's actions were taken in good faith. I understand that to date only a couple of people have had access to the full report. Does he consider that the limited number of people who have been furnished with the full report are sufficient to ensure we learn the maximum from the report? That is a big responsibility to place on a couple of people. Professionally, my reading of the extracts that are available makes it clear it is essential that at least one person who has access to the full report should have a background and experience in disability to gain the maximum from the report.

I second the amendment to the effect that the Minister of State, subject to legal advice, will make the full report available. It is essential that we take whatever lesson is to be learned and apply it. If for some reason legal advice does not make it possible for the full report to go before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, I suggest a small group with the appropriate expertise could be established that would have access to the full report to ensure the maximum lesson possible is learnt from the report and that it is applied in practical ways across front-line services, and to have responsibility for developing a concrete plan for the implementation of what has been learned.

I welcome a number of specific recommendations from the part of the report available to us, including the focus on early intervention services and the need for standardisation, and the recommendations on the need for the responsibilities of individuals to be spelled out, with regular reviews and in-service training. In particular, I welcome the recommendation on communication. That is an area that will always be difficult to address across such wide and disparate services.

One factor that makes it especially difficult is the professional balance that is required on occasion between maintaining confidentiality and ensuring safety. One of the points that comes across strongly from the bits of the report to which we have access is that it appeared that individual clinicians, practitioners and team members had different pieces of the stories on their files but that the first time all that information became available was when each person handed it over to the review team who compiled the report. The lesson for us is how seemingly disparate bits of information could paint a very different picture when considered collectively. We will always struggle to achieve a balance given the professionalism required of us to maintain confidentiality and given circumstances where it is not necessary to breach that confidentiality. Sometimes when people only have pieces of a story that do not flag an immediate concern, they do not share that information with other professionals.

I welcome the recommendation on the out-of-hours social work service. I am aware of the points the Minister of State made on the limited resources. Is it possible to be creative with this? I welcome the commitment the Minister of State gave us this evening on the place of safety service from next month. With new contracts, is it possible to look at out-of-hours social services a bit differently? Maybe we do not always have to have a nine to five work rota. Is it possible to vary that a little bit and to have an extended service?

I welcome the recommendations regarding familicide and the suggestions that it may be of interest to the State to undertake research at some stage. The report identifies vulnerable families and family support, mental health and child protection. It also identifies disabilities and the subsequent vulnerability arising for families and children as a result of disabilities. Given my background, I would like to address this issue for a moment.

I believe that disabilities and the challenges arising from them played a very significant role in this case. There are many aspects of the description of family life that is consistent with challenges encountered through disabilities. These include the information provided to us in this report on budgeting, the isolation of the family, the accumulation of debt, being picked on within the community, hoses being placed through the letter box and eggs being thrown at the window. These are all consistent with the identification of people with disabilities as being vulnerable. Other issues include planning and an ability to keep and maintain appointments. People with disabilities face similar challenges. I accept that disability issues are not identified within the generic HSE services where there is no existing background in disabilities, but I note from the report that both Adrian and Ciara had been identified at a young age as having presented with special needs.

One lesson that we could take from the report is that there is an emerging need to help people with mild intellectual disability. These people might leave the special school system or special class system in schools, and because they are leaving the Department of Education and Science, there is no automatic link with support services at 18 years of age. They can often fall through the cracks in the system and they only come to the attention of support services and the authorities. For young women, such difficulties include early pregnancy and for young men they include running into problems with the law. This is an area that would be well worth identifying. From my personal experience, I know that people with mild intellectual disabilities who try to establish family lives for themselves can encounter ordinary difficulties that become serious if they do not receive support at an early stage. We then only become aware of these difficulties when they lead to a child protection issue for their children.