Catherine Byrne (Dublin South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their very interesting submissions. I greatly appreciate that they took the time to be so specific about certain matters. I have one or two comments and a question. I am still in shock after reading about the 9,500 children waiting to be allocated a social worker and having realised that 3,000 of them are high risk. What is deemed high risk?

Recently, I have taken time to speak to principals in the area I represent. Some of the cases they come across in primary schools are quite frightening, and teachers and principals are distressed over how they are being dealt with. Trying to get children into a service has become a significant difficulty for them, and they all stressed that to me.

I have learned from where I live and where I worked in the community before I became a Member of the Oireachtas that the problem seems to be generational. It seems to extend through generations of families. One of the reports referred to poverty and isolation. I do not disagree with this but knowing the number of services on the ground, particularly community services such as after school programmes, family resource centres, local projects and even parenting courses, and the millions of euro that go into them each year, I wonder whether there are too many services rather than one service that would be able to deal with everything. Sometimes I suspect many of these services duplicate one another.

Recently, I was at a mass in my parish where a man spoke about fostering and said the number of children in Dublin 8, 10 and 12 requiring foster care was the highest in the country. He was looking for more foster parents. I was really taken aback by that. I wondered where we are going wrong. A huge amount of money is being pumped into the system and yet we still have this growing phenomenon of children being put into care.

Dr. Buckley said a more far-reaching solution is required. Will she expand on that? Insufficient data were mentioned. This is one of the main problems we have. Down through the years when working with young children in youth clubs, I always found that most of the children we dealt with locally were first identified as being at risk by the teachers in primary school. That seems to still be the case. I do not believe we give enough credit to teachers who can identify the significant needs children have from speaking to and working with them. We must pay tribute to them because teaching is a very important part of all our lives. For teachers to have insight and to be able to identity children at risk is of great benefit.