Dr. Conor O'Mahony:

As a general matter, Tusla as an organisation is under-resourced. Senator Black focused specifically on addiction in her comments. There is a very distinct link between addiction and the child protection issues that come to the attention of Tusla. Tusla's social workers are so overburdened in trying to address the critical cases that this keeps them from doing the kind of work on early intervention that they might like to do and that might catch things further upstream and prevent them becoming more acute, as Senator Black suggests. As a general matter, when we talk about child protection, if we want early intervention to work then we need to resource Tusla to be able to do that.