Mr. Gordon Jeyes:

The Minister of State, Deputy Lynch, has made these points, so perhaps it is time for a review. I believe we are establishing credibility. I believe we should have a broader base. If we only have the crisis services, we will stack now and again, limited resources. The veil will be undressed and one will see some of these crises. Mr. Fred McBride, chief operations officer, will discuss the out-of-hours services. I expect the out-of-hours service to be started shortly.

The point was made about the spotlight. We are the spotlight. We are not part of a large organisation. Our modus operandiis the safety of children. We are putting the safety of children first and we need to address it.

I will now respond to the points raised by Deputy Conway. We need to restructure, so that we do not have two geographic areas covering everything. We feel that child protection and welfare services should be covered by a team, duty and intake covered by a team and children in care and fostering covered by a team. We have had protracted discussions, going through the normal process and coming to an end with the need to implement that system.

As I indicated, in many ways, I found the questions raised by Deputy Fleming, who is committed to his area, the most distressing. While a helpline was established, there was one telephone call a day and none over the weekend. Other Members have approached me to continue with this service. There are cultural and leadership changes and people need to accept that we have had discussion, we have reached a collective view about how to do things better and how we should be treating our clients with respect and how we should be responding to referrals. From my discussions with senior members of the Garda Síochána, and I am meeting the Assistant Commissioner tomorrow, they tell me that the situation is improving across the country, but there are some pockets where it is not improving and this is unacceptable. Acknowledging the situation is important but it is how we close the loop later on and how we can share the information about the child with the public health nurse and the school principal.