Mr. Fred McBride:

Each role is at a different stage. Some will have had job offers, some will have had start dates already established and some will be waiting on Garda vetting. We are confident we can get most of the 304 staff in by the end of the year, and a further 150 staff next year. Overall there will be 454 new staff members over the next 14 months or thereabouts. As part of the 2018 estimates process there is investment to deal with that. It is difficult to be precise and say that will be enough staff to deal with the increase in referrals, but we base these numbers on the case scenarios we developed. We created a reasonably sophisticated business case. If the numbers of referrals are within that modest bracket we feel that Tusla can cope with it. It is not all about social workers. There are only a limited number of social workers produced in Ireland every year. It also encompasses administrative grades, social care workers, family support workers and other grades of staff as well who can assist in diverting referrals away from the "statutory" social work intervention. Some of these referrals can be diverted to a lower level, a less formal type of response. It is very important that we respond to these referrals in a proportionate way by neither over-reacting or under-reacting to them. We are confident with the investment and with the numbers that we have projected that we can deal with that.

A very important development is our national childcare information system, NCCIS. It is a client index system, a management information system which will track all of the children we deal with now and into the future, regardless of where they are in the country. Eight of our 17 operational areas will be using NCCIS by the end of this year, with the remaining nine coming on stream by the summer of next year. That will assist in getting a timely and proportionate response to these referrals and ensure that as children move around the country with their families they are tracked and that whatever response we have made to those referrals is captured and that information shared. We will also have a dedicated email address in each of the 17 areas for receiving and responding to mandated reports, which is another development we are putting in place at the moment. We are becoming increasingly independent from the HSE on the ICT front. We have our own domain now which contains Tusla-only information and which is managed by us. We are not relying on the HSE in that regards. The roll-out of NCCIS will represent significant progress for the whole ICT strategy. While we cannot be completely sure about the increase in referrals we have made a reasonably sophisticated calculation in terms of what we need, which formed the business case that went to the Department as part of the estimates process.