Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

When Senator Doherty says it is no small beans, in 2018 it was €185,000. In 2019, it was €14,000. In 2020, it was €240,773, or 38% of the income of St. John's Ambulance Ireland for that year. In 2021 it was €286,800. We have a total in excess of €700,000 that the organisation has received from the State since 2018. While I suspect that some of the 2020 and 2021 figures are related to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still not at that ten-month place where the 2022 figures are out yet, so we do not know what it got in that year. I sincerely hope it is not getting anything this year.

The report by Dr. Geoffrey Shannon revealed very serious incidents. Young people in the Kilmainham unit of this organisation were preyed upon by an individual. They were raped in the back of St. John's ambulances. It is not acceptable that the Minister can just say that it is not a body under the aegis of his Department. Technically, that is true, but "aegis" includes support. It was getting support from the Government, and has been getting it for a number of years, and that is only from the accounts that I could get access to and see for myself.

There is the role of Tusla in this, which borders on negligence insofar as it did not go into the teeth behind that safeguarding statement. It signed off on them until it was challenged repeatedly by the survivors. We have a failure of teeth in childcare, with regard to going in and actually inspecting. A recommendation is going to come from the childcare committee to say that this needs to be like to the Health and Safety Authority or the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, where they can actually go in and do inspections and look for evidence of adherence to safeguarding, not mere lip service.

All the while, the St. John's Ambulance Ireland has been putting it out that it gave an apology and was providing counselling support and therapy services when in actual fact, its attack dogs, in the course of any civil litigation, are going after, forensically analysing and intimidating and using their lawyers and the justice system to intimidate these survivors on a daily basis. They are sending a plethora of discovery motions and letters to them, wanting to know every intimate detail of the survivors' lives, and really lay it at their feet that they came from poverty and so they cannot be believed. That is not acceptable.

We need the State to stand up very strongly and make sure that, for a start, it does not get any more funding from us, and we need to unearth that we do have a responsibility. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is going back to review what it can do further in light of this, because this was brought to our attention by the survivors.