Mr. Jim Gibson:

Money is one element of it. As a social worker my biggest frustration was that I could not get access to services when I had carried out assessments. Many of these were complex cases that were known to other State agencies and related in particular to young people involved in criminality who had poor mental health status. As we are a welfare agency they sometimes come back to us without an integrated approach. There have been some really good developments in Tusla over the past year, including the creative community alternatives. The feedback from social workers is that it is really good to have a resource at hand at an area level which allows them to engage a young person in an appropriate therapeutic intervention. We are also on the cusp of rolling out our therapeutic service across the country. This service was piloted in the Waterford-Wexford area. We have therapeutic models in our special care service and our national alternative care, AC, service is now a regional service. It works from a therapeutic model as well. We have also introduced Signs of Safety. We are travelling in the right direction to do away with some of the frustrations for social workers and principal social workers, such as trying to access placements or interventions when a young person presents in crisis at, say, 5 p.m. on Friday evening. The Signs of Safety programme has opened the door to engagement with parents in terms of their concerns and what they consider to be the solutions. We can help them in that regard. We can also deal with the safety aspects of the planned intervention. It is positive to hear practitioners and managers on the front line speak enthusiastically about a new practice model.

I chaired child protection conferences for ten years in south Tipperary and I saw that parents were not being considered in the process. Interventions involved a group of professionals having a conversation at a high level, to which poor mum or dad would agree to get out the door. How positive was that? It was not positive in the least. Was it going to create good outcomes for children? Not necessarily. I strongly believe that what we are doing now is moving in the right direction. This is evidenced in the call-back days and so on, which perhaps Mr. Quinlan could do a comprehensive report on to the committee.