Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is welcome that we have a Minister and a Department with responsibility for children and youth affairs. However, the services available from agencies throughout the country remain disparate in nature. For example, some are provided by the Departments of Justice and Equality and Health, while others are provided by local authorities. Is there a need to streamline the system even further in order that there might be greater accountability and transparency, particularly in research and the development of policy? As stated, I am merely outlining my experiences on this issue and I do not have in-depth knowledge of it. We are all aware, however, of children who are dropped to someone's house to be minded and whose parents pay cash for the privilege. Their parents collect them at the end of the day. I may be wrong, but this generally seems to work. Most of the problems in this area have arisen in organised child-minding services. Will our guests comment on that issue?

Are public health nurses responsible for carrying out inspections? Most members will agree that public health nurses already have enough to do. I accept, however, that they are eminently qualified to perform many duties. Is there a need to look elsewhere for people to carry out inspections? There is already a dearth of public health nurses throughout the country and those we have are under huge pressure. They are not able to cover the areas for which they are responsible because there are not enough of them available to do so. Should we look to others to carry out inspections of child-care facilities?

Like most Deputies, I knock on doors for a living. In that context, one can quickly establish whether a household is under pressure. Referendums have been held on this matter, particularly in the context of when the State should intervene. There were tragic cases of gardaí intervening too soon in cases that had been brought to their attention and before they had carried out sufficient background research. I refer to instances where children were taken into care for short periods and where this had a very negative impact on the families involved. Are there sufficient front-line staff to interact with parents and children? Alarm bells should immediately sound in the case of children who regularly play truant from school. This probably indicates that there is a problem within the relevant household. There is no framework in place for the gathering of the necessary information from the school involved or the school inspectorate and feeding it into the system. If this were to happen, perhaps we could identify the households which might be in trouble. Reference is made to putting systems in place and there were very tragic cases where matters ended up in court. In such instances it should have been patently obvious to an individual professional who had access either to the parents, in social settings, or the children, in school settings, that there was a problem. However, it was not possible for those within the system to correlate all of the available evidence and determine whether there was a problem.

I accept that my comments may not be directly related to the report. However, I am strongly of the view that there is a need for early intervention in the case of children who need it.