Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The plan must be submitted to me by 31 January 2014. The board discussed it last week.

In response to the Deputy's question, all services under the early childhood care and education, ECCE schemes have been required to adhere to the principles of Síolta and Aistear from the outset. The local child care committees provide assistance for the services to do this and use the online tools developed for that framework. In addition, we have piloted a mentoring programme. In fact, I went to the presentation of that pilot programme, which was really impressive. More than 20 mentors have been working in the service. Obviously from next year onwards, I hope to have a new mentoring service in place which will see a further 30 or 40 mentors available to child care services to increase their implementation of Síolta and Aistear. It takes training, supervision and mentoring for the services to achieve the standards envisaged in Síolta and Aistear.

On the question of recruitment of inspectors, the posts have been advertised but to date they have been confined to public health nurses. I will have discussions about broadening it out. Five inspectors have been recruited and it is envisaged that a further ten will be. They will cover the vacant postions in Louth, Dublin south, east Wicklow, Cavan, Monaghan, Sligo-Leitrim and west Cavan which will effectively mean that most areas will be covered. It will bring the number of inspectors up to 50. We were allocated money in the budget to do this.

The Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter, is addressing the issue of the transferability of vetting. There are concerns about transferring vetting because if it was allowed to be transferred to every other agency, there is a worry that an offence committed in the meantime would not be picked up. That is the reason there is such regular vetting. I understand the Minister is examining the issue and will publish proposals on making the system more effective. He is examining the issue of transferability to see what improvements could be made. The Deputy is correct when he states it is very difficult for agencies and many have asked that if a person has been vetted by a child care service, whether it could simply be transferred if he or she was taking up another job in the child care service. I do not think the proposals have been published yet, but in the meantime additional staff have been made available to the vetting service.

There are places available in detention centres. That is due in part to the recent court decision that young people in detention should have remission. The provision of places has not been a problem in recent months. The position varies considerably, as the Deputy is aware, and in the course of last year there were periods when no beds were available.

We published the expert group's report on the early years strategy Right from the Start some weeks ago and it is the intention, as I have always said, that, first, we will have an overall framework document and that very quickly after this we will have the early years strategy and youth strategy published. Intensive and extensive work is in progress on the framework document which will set the scene for these two other policies. The framework should be published in the early part of this year and the early years study and strategy will follow from it.

Progress has been made on the legislative programme. We had a significant workload on the legislation to establish the agency and the emergency legislation which has been welcomed. It placed major demands on the Department and, in addition, we had the child care legislation. Last year the Department had to deal with three pieces of legislation. I will not go back over the history of Children First, but in all probability it will be the subject of the next piece of legislation to be published and is very close to finalisation. We have received legal advice on sanctions which has changed the approach we have been taking somewhat. That is the reason we have needed more time to take account of it. Let me assure the committee that work is ongoing on the Children First legislation. The fact that the agency has been established and will have a number of months to get on with the work of implementation before publication of the Children First legislation will work well. I do not accept the assertion that children are not being protected because the safeguards are not in place. Obviously, we want to bring forward the Children First legislation to remove any ambivalence among professionals about reporting child protection concerns. The evidence is that referrals are being made; there has been a significant increase in the number of referrals. People are also contacting the agency if they have some concerns and are getting good advice from the agency. The Bills dealing with Children First and adoption will be introduced in the next period.

The Government recognises the points made on alcohol by the special rapporteur on child protection. Many of the issues raised by the Deputy will be covered in the proposed public health Bill. Just a few weeks ago the Government made a decision for the first time ever to publish a public health Bill dealing with alcohol. It will take account of and deal with many of the issues that affect children such as advertising, cut-off times for certain advertisements and billboard advertising. I agree with the Deputy that this is an issue that must be taken extremely seriously and I have expressed my view on it that we must have the strongest possible legislation because alcohol is such a key factor in terms of admissions to care and child protection concerns. I think one third of children in care are there because of alcohol issues in the family of origin. It is a very serious issue and the Government has shown that it takes it very seriously by its approach to the legislation.