Lisa McDonald (Fianna Fail)

I too welcome the efforts of Norah Gibbons and her committee in publishing the report and commend the bravery of the children of the family in supporting the publication of the report in the hope that this will never happen again. We have had the McColgan report, the Kilkenny incest report and now we have another report. I just wonder how much work has been done over the past three or four years since the beginning of the term of this Seanad. The Minister of State with responsibility for children said in his press release last night that he would meet with the HSE to hear its proposals on how it will implement the main recommendations of the report. This causes me concern, because here we have just another example of HSE failure, systems failure and people failing young children and society. I do not know how the HSE can do what is necessary.

I have heard people say that public servants have let these children down, but we, as politicians, have also failed. Senator Harris spoke about the moral courage of public servants. There is little moral courage here when we look into our hearts to see how much we have done to protect children or how much we have done to ensure this will never happen again. I hope we will not be here in another five or ten years looking at more reports and wondering when this will happen again. We need to bring this issue to the forefront. It is swept under the carpet on every possible occasion. I do not want to go over the nitty gritty of this particular case, as that would not help at all. However, we can see clearly that people have failed in their duties and heads need to roll.

We have seen a similar failure in the banking area and in the various economic crises facing us.