Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. Like everybody else, I welcome mandatory reporting. I cannot be strong enough in saying that. I read the national guidelines on child protection and welfare practice. I read through as much of the handbook as I could because of a particular aspect of mandatory reporting that has arisen frequently in the past year in regard to adults. My history of working with people is one of working with adults, including people with addictions and the homeless, and people in the community sector. What has been arising in the field of counselling concerns retrospective reporting.I was recently approached to help someone find a counsellor. Of the counsellors I contacted, three out of four turned this person away because they were not sure whether they would have to mandatorily report retrospective abuse. This person is an adult and may be talking about something from 20 years ago. One counsellor felt they did not have the capacity or the knowledge of that individual to be able to assess whether any other children were at risk 20 or 30 years on. The counsellor did not know the person well enough and did not have their history. The counsellor did not want to sit down with the individual without having the relationship with them and when that individual might not have been ready to go through a reporting procedure or a procedure with an Garda. A counsellor would have to try to balance protecting potential victims with protecting the individual adult who is speaking about this for the very first time.

When I was reading through the HSE's child protection and welfare practice handbook I saw that "all designated personnel should be required to caution clients about their reporting obligations". I read this handbook after I had these difficulties in getting counselling for people. Perhaps that line, where counsellors are warning clients that they will have to report anything they disclose in this regard, causes people to walk away because they are not ready to go through that procedure. I wonder about these knock-on effects in terms of retrospective disclosures.

In another case an addiction worker contacted me in respect of mandatory reporting. This person had contacted Tusla and filed a report about a young girl who was a service user. This girl's drug use spiked rapidly because she was not ready for this to go to that level. She was talking about something that had happened in her past. The length of time it took for Tusla to engage with the report was an issue. It took a number of weeks. I understand that is a resource issue but this individual was not only not ready for this to happen but was also not in a position to know what was going on. Nobody was communicating with her. I know the services at the time really struggled with the level her drug use reached during that period of waiting to find out what was happening. She did not know whether gardaí would show up at her house or at the family house where she had said this had happened to her as a child. There is all this uncertainty both among the people who are making the retrospective disclosures and among the counsellors and workers who do not even know whether they have to make a disclosure so soon or whether they can wait and work with that adult for a period of six to eight weeks or three months in order to get them into a position where they are ready to take on the traumatic experience of following this through and perhaps even, for the very first time, having to let their families know that they can expect a call from Tusla or the Garda.

I also read in section 3.6 of Children First, which is on retrospective disclosures, that it is really up to that individual to be able to assess the risk to other children. Counsellors do not feel they are in a position to be able to do that. They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of what they need to do. There are some niche areas and I would love to put the Minister in contact with some of the people experiencing these problems in order to iron out some of it so that it can be a bit clearer to people working on the ground.