Mr. Gareth Noble:

I will address a number of the issues. On the play therapy issue, in child care proceedings where children are taken into the care of the State, we are seeing much more emphasis on child therapy and all the feedback is highly positive in terms of allowing children the space to deal with traumatic situations.

Deputy Ó Laoghaire referred to the role of CAMHS and presentations at accident and emergency wards. One of the biggest difficulties that parents and children face is the fact there are no CAMHS out-of-hours services or weekend cover and, quite often, some of the really traumatic experiences that children and young people face manifest out of hours and at weekends. The issue of infant mental health is a new development and is something with which everyone is trying to grapple. It is also related to attachment issues. We are seeing the need for a lot more specialisation in terms of infant mental health and attachment issues.

I thank Deputy O'Sullivan for referring to the need for cross-party and cross-departmental collaboration. One of the greatest frustrations I have as a child lawyer, with which I could paper the office, is that when I highlight an issue to a particular Department or a particular public authority, nine out of ten times I get a letter back saying I should be referring to somebody else. In one example, I referred something to a particular Department that referred me to a different Department. When I wrote to the second Department, it referred me back to the original Department and all the while, children are getting lost in that system. We need to develop mechanisms whereby these things are dealt with properly. One difficulty with taking Tusla out of the HSE and developing it as a stand-alone agency is that many of the child protection issues, which include mental health, continue to remain the responsibility of the HSE. That has been a big difficulty in terms of fully realising the ability of Tusla to do its job in protecting children.