Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

Things have moved on from when we started to debating the Bill in the Seanad. I have received advice from the Attorney General that it is in the nature of being mandatory. There are two stages. An assessment must be carried out of whether there is a need and once the need is established, the obligation is on the HSE to deliver a service. That is a long way from a simple discretionary service. It might fall short of the word "shall", which is mandatory, but where the HSE establishes that there is a need, there is an obligation on it to provide. That is the strong advice we have received from the Attorney General's office. It is an opinion we had ourselves in the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, but on foot of requests from the Seanad for clarity, that is now the position. Therefore, it is actually much stronger. As well as this, we provided €1 million in financial support for aftercare in the 2010 budget.

It would be unfair to say nothing has changed since Committee Stage. We now have that in place as legal advice. It allows us to communicate with the HSE which is anxious to provide additional aftercare service. It also allows us to communicate with the HSE to clarify that position. All that remains for me is to ask a question I have. If it is the case that the interpretation of the section is as I have described it, why not take it out of the realm of interpretation and make it a literal obligation for the purpose of clarity? However, if one wants to come away from the legislative niceties, it seems we have moved on and we have a clarification of this discretionary power. It is like many discretionary powers. Once the need has arisen, the power given under the statute must be exercised by the HSE. That is significant progress. However, I repeat that I would consider looking at moving this out of the realm of interpretation into a more literal expression of the Oireachtas's intention in this area.