Mr. Fergus Finlay:

Senator van Turnhout asked about the meaning of phase one and phase two. My understanding is phase one means "now" and phase two means "not now". It would be far more helpful if we had a more specific meaning for phase two.

Several members raised the issue of public health nurses. I take the point entirely. The public health nurse is an invaluable community resource.

Perhaps I should say that I am not here to represent community nurses and public health nurses, but we in Barnardos, and many of those present, work closely with them.

In larger urban centres there are a great many public health nurses who are, if I could use a meaningless term, more "child specific" in their work. In less populated areas they carry a wider brief and they are as important to the elderly person living at home and to the disabled adult as they are to the child. That would represent a structural and cultural issue that would require to be managed.

There is a fundamental aspect which is about the sharing of information. Professor Dolan made the point about inter-agency joined-up thinking which has been on the agenda for 20 years. Community nurses have an enormous volume of information about what is happening in the lives of children, younger people and elderly people, but they tend to carry it - I do not mean this disrespectfully - in the boots of their cars or keep it under their stairs at home or in the office. It is not centralised. It is not sought. It is not codified in a way that makes it useful. There is one small experiment going on somewhere in the country where such data is computerised. We would solve many problems if we merely addressed that issue, the real, meaningful codifying and sharing of information in a highly structured way.

The final point I wanted to make relates to Deputy Naughten's point about poverty. The Deputy is correct. The new poverty phenomenon that we all are seeing is deep, sharp and painful. I suspect that if the committee had a representative of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul here, he or she would tell the committee, as a member of the society said to me recently, that the society has many who were active and strong volunteers a couple of years ago who now need its help. We all have experienced the phenomenon - it happens in the workplace that is Barnardos as well as everywhere else - of double-income families now having a single bread-winner or no bread-winner. However, there is a difference - I do not want to overstate it - between the child whose family has suffered a loss of income and the child who is born and reared in a dysfunctional family situation in a disadvantaged community. Both children have mountains to climb. One of them has to climb Mount Everest in order to make it. We cannot lose sight of that either.