The Commission can only investigate matters included in the Terms of Reference which have been set by the Government.
Under its Terms of Reference, the Commission will:
- Consider the handling of concerns of child sexual abuse that occurred between 1927 and 2013 in all day and boarding schools, including special schools.
- Identify and investigate failures by schools to respond to concerns of child sexual abuse in a way that adequately protected children, and examine the causes of those failures.
- Examine how An Garda Síochána, the Health Service Executive (and its predecessor or successor bodies), and the Department of Education handled concerns of child sexual abuse reported to them.
- Report on the impact of sexual abuse on survivors and identify any lessons that may help further strengthen child protection in the future.
The Commission is not tasked with investigating individual cases of child sexual abuse or making findings about individual perpetrators. Its role is to examine how concerns of child sexual abuse were handled.
Further information can be found here if you are worried about a child’s safety now’ with entire sentence as live link to new page which contains the information directly below it in the If You Are Worried About a Child’s Safety Now’ section (delete this section from About the Commission page)