Probation and Welfare Service
Dail Éireann — 2025-07-03
============================================================

Paul McAuliffe (FF), Dublin North-West

Perhaps a redress scheme would be overly complex and result in people receiving justice delayed. Equally, we should not be placing the burden on victims of having to sue the State. That is not necessarily the best way forward. We have seen in other cases where people's only option is to sue the State and often justice is incredibly delayed. Perhaps there is a mechanism here to try to mediate this and to try to come forward with a non-adversarial solution.
The criminal justice process is not an option because the person is deceased but there are also questions about what the State knew about this gentleman's service. He worked for the Probation Service for decades. It is incredibly important that whatever information or files are available to the Department of justice are reviewed and we air what was known. As we have seen with other cases of sexual abuse, it is important there is transparency about what happens.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-07-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:46+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-07-03