Dr. Helen Buckley:

I will start with Deputy Ó Caoláin's question about measuring the tipping point, which was a very good question. To refer back to my submission, I said the data produced by the Child and Family Agency is very poor. All we really know is how many children are referred to the service and how many are screened out at the other end. It does not give very accurate figures on the causes. My colleague, Dr. Coulter, has probably been the first person to shine a light on what the most prevalent problems are for children in terms of the court system. Many more children are experiencing parental factors which do not even get as far as the court system. We require good data, we need to know who is making referrals, what are the problems and what are the interventions that are working. The partial solution to that is that the agency should improve its data collection methods and the Department should oversee this. Not only should it collect better information but it should interrogate that information more efficiently so that it can measure aspects such as the tipping point, where are the gaps and where the services might make a difference.

I very much appreciate Senator van Turnhout's interest in these issues, in particular her efforts to put pressure on the HSE to pay attention to the need for investing resources in child protection. A review of the Child Care Act could answer the question raised by Deputy McLellan also in terms of who will provide these services and who they will be accountable to. I would like to see the Departments of Education and Skills, Health and Justice and Equality identified as statutory agents in respect of providing services for children so that there could no longer be any prevarication about who provides services and that there is transparency and accountability. Governance is very important.

When I refer to investing in services in the sites where the problems arise, I am not referring to informal community-based services but to trained social workers who have the capacity to assess the severity of problems and, where necessary, to refer them to the statutory services.