Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I looked for a debate on Irish Water. I will ask the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to come to the House at his earliest convenience.

Senator Dolan spoke about the importance, as we all appreciate, of family businesses throughout the country. Apart from the products or services they produce, they are the backbone of industry in Ireland.

Senator Seery Kearney spoke about leaflets, which are an example of the factory of disinformation and the organisations behind its production. It is an issue we need to be careful about. In addition, as I have been responding to and shouting for in the past week, in the absence of information from the Government or any of our agencies, it is not a surprise that disinformation is landing and people are believing it. We need a public awareness or public information campaign on what the State is doing and what the State expects in the context of crises or difficulties in the provision of services in the next year, particularly around our immigrants that are coming to the country and will continue to do so.

I thank Senator Seery Kearney for bringing up Mick Finnegan's protest. I am in contact with him not just once a day but on numerous occasions every day. I am blue in the face, as he is, asking people of importance to call for the publication of the St. John Ambulance report, most recently, the Taoiseach. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, went so far as to write to the chair of St. John Ambulance. He got the most banal, insulting response that everybody, including Mick, all the survivors and even Dr. Geoffrey Shannon have been getting, which is that St. John Ambulance has a body of work to do and will publish the report when that work is complete.It has had the report since the beginning of November. I put in requests for information as to how many board meetings have occurred since it received the report. I am told that only standard board meetings, which happen once every two months, have taken place. It is no wonder the body of work is not complete, in order to have the report published.

The way the victims are being treated is absolutely disgusting. That is the only way I can describe it. The trustees of this charity do not take seriously the impact that their continuing work is having on the hundreds of people who met with Dr. Geoffrey Shannon in the past year to 18 months. I do not believe that they are unaware of the impact they are having. I am left to think that there must be something else going on with the report that maybe reflects on the actions of St. John Ambulance today as opposed to its historical actions. Either way, we have a group of men who have been sexually abused at the hands of individuals who St. John Ambulance was aware at the time and did nothing about for around 20 years. It continues to procrastinate and is not dealing with the matter. That is absolutely disgusting.

I call on all Senators to use their offices in any way possible in order to try to support the victims. By this time next week, if we do not have the report, I am going to name every one of the trustees and start calling them out for the lack of responsibility they have shown towards this report and, indeed, the victims who were brave enough to come forward in such numbers to Dr. Geoffrey Shannon. I will do so in the interests of supporting him.