A true account of the carry on, Tusla investigation and subsequent result.
The issue at hand is based on a young person who experienced unwanted attention and advances from another young person in a Dublin based division. The officers locally, acted in a perfectly respectable, efficient manner and followed all child protection procedures. The issue is not what happened, but what happened next.
When investigating any incident, it is important to support the victim, to listen to their wishes and investigate thoughly. It is not to ignore the childs wishes, or contact people the child wishes to have as support - and tell them they cannot be part of it, or contact tusla and make disparaging reports about the family and their home. Nobody knows the modern day stresses people are under and when a family is stressed already, attacks on the family unit of a victim are wholly inappropriate. One of the parents had been hospitalised around that time and this created more stress.
There is a large amount of information that we have to filter. We may scan the documents and post them here - it is our data after all, our privacy cannot be infringed BY US. We are explaining what they did, and then if we post the documents, you can draw your own conclusions.
Under data protection laws, any person can serve a data request on a data controller for a release of data held about them.
Unfortunately, our data request was not processed. The Tusla data officer could not explain why our request was not fulfilled, and the family subsequently had to make an official complaint to the Data Protection Comissioner to get it.
The St John request got lost as well. The person involved told us over the phone they knew nothing about the request. Yet the person we contacted for the release told me they notified the child protection person the same day. We guess this is why you should always do things in writing so people dont forget.