Ms Norah Gibbons:

I very much welcome the discussion that took place in the State during the children's referendum campaign on recognising the voices of children. People are beginning to understand, albeit not in the numbers we would have liked, that children are unique by reason of their youthfulness and we need to pay special attention to them.

Parenting courses of different types and quality have been taking place for many years in the country. The triple P parenting programme, which has been tested and works, is now available. It is supported by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the Department of Health and is being rolled out in the midlands. We hope it will be rolled out over time.

I constantly refer to family resource centres because I am very fond of the services they provide. Last year, 1,242 adults and 566 children benefitted from programme activities, including parenting programmes and the Strengthening Families programmes. The community mothers programme, under which mothers in the community visit first-time mothers, particularly those at risk, has been widely deployed throughout the country.

For many years I was the chair of Treoir, the organisation providing support for young parents. The number of parents aged under 18 is falling and has been for some time, which is good. Once young people are looking forward to a different life involving work, the rate decreases. Young parents are not bad parents; rather, they can be very good parents if they have support within their families. In the past, as the committee knows, the tradition in Ireland, unfortunately, was that young parents were removed from the family orbit because people did not want to acknowledge what had happened. Nowadays they are kept within the family and for most of them things work very well.

There are a number of programmes for young parents. I was previously employed by Barnardos, which runs one of them. Others, run by the HSE and other organisations around the country, are specifically about supporting teenage parents and taking over from the specialised clinics to which Senator Burke referred. We do not need to set up a specific programme but, rather, to help parents into programmes that already exist. With the integration of resources into one agency that will be easier. If we discover an area of the country has nothing for teenage parents we can talk to the family resource centres easily, because they will be a part of the whole, as well as other agencies. We will able to identify that a need has arisen and ask whether the agency can address it. I recognise that we cannot always build in new resources. We must examine how we are using the current resources.

The NEWB is joining the child and family agency and will have a representative on the senior management team, as I understand it. It will continue to carry out its current role; the Act will not change that. It will come under the board of the child and family agency but its tasks will remain the same. I am very happy that as the agencies begin to work as one the information and expertise they have will be much easier to access for children who may be at serious risk of falling out of school, which is a key factor. If we want to succeed with children and young people we need to keep them in the education system or adapt it to hold onto such children, particularly troubled children who are often in services such as Youthreach.

Alcohol is a major problem for children and families in this country. It is a major problem for the country. I know the Government is examining the issue. It is, perhaps, difficult to admit to the level of misuse of alcohol in this country. It is a major public health matter and is commented on as such. It is to be hoped there will be some recognition of that.