Martin Daly: Urges Adult Safeguarding Authority After Abuse Scandals

and the witnesses here today to the Safeguarding Ireland and the Irish Association of Social Workers and for your statements, which were very comprehensive. I think the thing that struck me was the – and I am satisfied that you have extended the scope beyond what we were considering, which was the nursing home scandal recently, and the other scandals which were institutional care. And I want to be careful how I say this. I am happy that you have identified this as an endemic problem, that it is widespread, that it is not just simply institutional, that it is in the community. And I would say the vast majority of adult abuse is in the community rather than institutions. I think possibly the responsibility of regulation of institutions comes under government and under HSE and HICWA. But the widespread abuse, and as a GP, I would have seen this in the thing, and some of it can be very, very subtle. I am taken by the issues around both deprivation of liberty, the financial abuse of people we often associated only with older people, but it is people who are vulnerable of all age groups, and it is also people who perhaps are living with disability. And I am also struck by the chaotic system that we have at the moment with the No One organisation having overall responsibility for the investigation of adult abuse. You quite rightly point out in both of your documents that there is no one gate for people to go through. There is the HSE, HICWA, and I want to note that HICWA were here a couple of weeks ago and they would have been quite clear that they had no role in individual complaints, but rather institutional complaints. They were looking for an extension of powers. It is clear from both of your documents that the legislation needs to be progressed, that there needs to be a setting up of an adult safeguarding authority that would have an overarching role in terms of investigation of this. I am also taken by the number of complaints that you receive at Safeguarding Ireland, but can do nothing but send them to various different institutions, but there is no coordination. I think that both of your documents have put that out very clearly and I think that is a job of work. I am going to ask, firstly, Safeguarding Ireland, Ms Patricia Rickard-Clark, thank you for coming today. What do you feel are the things we need to do immediately to get this right? The Minister, Ciarán O'Donnell, has committed to progressing the safeguarding legislation and expediting it, but it has been around since 2017 and I think it has crystallised in the nursing home scandals of the last number of months that we really need to progress this. I might ask you that question first. Ciarán O'Donnell, the setting up now of our working group to actually ensure, first to analyse the Law Reform Commission's report, although there is a very clear blueprint in terms of the legislation they produced as a criminal law bill and a civil law bill set out in detail. Some of those offences that occurred recently in the nursing home could be enacted actually straight away because the Law Reform Commission suggested that some of those offences can be included to expand the Withholding of Information Act of the 2012 Act and also in other criminal law legislation. We do not need the overarching adult framework to deal with some of those offences straight away. Apart from that, we need the setting up of the working group, the Cabinet Committee to instigate. I am speaking to departments and public servants. They are waiting for a direction from government as to the next steps they should take. It is really important that they get a direction from government to have a working group interagency, interdepartmental. As you say, financial abuse is not documented. There is no data. It is widespread amongst all aspects. We have done surveys and found that even the person with a disability at age 19, the cocoon, all of those issues that have been identified by the Law Reform Commission. We need the working group set up to analyse the Law Reform Commission's document report and then to have a timetable for actually the enactment of the legislation. Just to come back, I mentioned the Assisted Decision-Making Capacity Act again. There was a bill in 2008 that did not commence until 2023. Meanwhile, people's human rights and all of that. We have delayed on the deprivation of liberty. We again had consultation in 2017. We have had another consultation now. We are now waiting on that legislation. There is a delay with everything. Meanwhile, people are being abused, people are being exploited, people are being neglected. There is no body to deal with that. When an issue arises, like in the Grace case, we then look at the different mechanisms. Is it a commission of investigation? Is it a one-man investigation or a public inquiry? Instead of having, like other jurisdictions in Scotland and others, have safeguarding boards and their obligation is to carry out those investigations. It does not need to be a very large body, but it can call in the expertise that it needs. It has the oversight, the timelines and the budget, all very necessary. Then the learnings from that. We have no learnings from any of the previous reports. Where are the learnings? We are still repeating the abuses. I hope I have answered. No, no, thank you. I just have to reset the lights. Thank you very much for the comprehensive reply. I would like to ask the Irish Association of Socialists. You made a number of I think the points being brought out about the widespread endemic abuse, often by family members, sometimes by carers, sometimes by the concerned neighbour who is doing jobs, and I have seen that in my own experience. You made some comments about the nursing home sector, and I have to agree with you, the day of the small community nursing home at the edge or in the village, where relatives, families, grandchildren were able to come in and out. I would like to ask you to expand on that view, how do you feel that things could be improved in that area? I think, as you rightly have pointed out, in Ireland we are now in a situation where many residents in nursing homes, whether that is older people or people with disabilities, are effectively isolated from their local communities. It is very common practice that when someone enters a nursing home, effectively all their engagement with other activities, social life, cultural events, ceases. And, you know, we have some excellent, fantastic nursing homes who do support very person-centred care, a human rights-based approach, who try to provide high quality of life, social stimulation, but we have many facilities that are very institutionalised. And I suppose, you know, people being very disengaged from their families, from their local communities, from their identity, and that is not the type of society that we want. We have excellent examples from across Europe and the world where we have smaller nursing home kind of household models, where there would be, as we mentioned in our statement, like maybe six people in a smaller community-based house. And I think really that is where we need to aspire to. You know, we need to integrate our residents, whether that's with younger people with disabilities or older people, more into our local communities. And again, look, this is an issue that not only affects current residents, it's an issue that will affect each and every one of us in terms of our ageing population. So I think that's something we're going to do is we're going to suspend for five minutes and try to get our lights back.