Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I concur with what the Minister has said and I am conscious that next week we have another opportunity at the quarterly meeting to go into the general scheme of things for next year. I acknowledge it is a new agency but many of the schemes run by the agency are not new. For example, the school completion programme, family resource centres, domestic services and the counselling services have been in operation for many years and have proven their worth but have had their funding drastically cut in recent years. There is nothing in the Supplementary Estimate to restore any of those cuts. The Minister said nobody can predict what will happen or how many children will come into care at any particular time and there is an element of truth in that but one also has the benefit of previous years of knowing the number of children on average who have come into care in the past ten decades. He will be aware there has been an increase in the number of referrals because people are much more vigilant than in the past, as a consequence of the awful inquiries we had to conduct into our shameful past on how we treated children. As a result there are more children who need more intervention and a greater level of support. We should be able to budget for that but, unfortunately, we have not been doing so.

It is not good enough for the Minister in his position as head of the Department to brush over and say that he concurs with my sentiments in respect of the legal costs because he is in a position to do something about it. I produced legislation 12 months ago in terms of how we might look at regulating this industry based on looking at best practice in other jurisdictions. I am sure it is easy for the Minister or any of his officials to put a finger on this - how much did we spend on legal fees in the past four and half years at a time when we were cutting family resource centres, counselling services and domestic services? It is not good enough, after four and half years, to say we are working on the issue and will address it. In my opinion, the savage downturn in the economy actually gave an opportunity to look at look at where there was waste. Nobody wanted to see it but there was an opportunity to look at the waste and reprioritise the areas to which funding was being allocated. In a Department which is so critical in terms of the protection and welfare of our children and so many services in the community that it supports, legal fees would not have been high on the agenda. One of my first priorities would have been to rein them in and ensure the money was best spent on front line services.