Mr. Pat Rabbitte:

I would like to say to Deputy Rabbitte - I have always wanted to say that - that I understand her frustration about the major issues she has raised. As she said, times have changed. A lot of issues that were concealed or hidden in the past are more frankly confronted now. I ask her to understand that intervening in a family is a very fine balance. By training, social workers are very sensitive in walking that narrow line. Perhaps the best way of enhancing our mutual knowledge about a modus vivendiin this area is the kind of engagement and political contact about which both Deputy Rabbitte and Deputy Sherlock have spoken. For example, last Friday the board spent a full day in Mullingar addressing issues affecting the midlands region. The regional and local staff made detailed presentations to the board, which were immensely impressive. There is no reason this could not be replicated for local Deputies, Senators and councillors.

I can see a potential difficulty in circumstances where a Deputy is confronted by parents in his or her clinic concerning a particular case. It is very difficult in those circumstances to make a phone call to anybody - An Garda Síochána, Tusla or whomsoever. There is not much point in giving people half-baked information that can only be misleading. There is room to enhance that understanding, as both Deputies have talked about.

Deputy Rabbitte is right about how times have changed. There were 57,000 referrals last year. If I stopped a person on the street and told him or her there were 57,000 referrals to Tusla last year, he or she would be amazed. When I started in the job I asked the senior management team at my first meeting if that number was good or bad. To a person, the team members said it was good because it meant that these issues were now being dealt with. It means the existence of the agency is becoming known and obviously mandatory reporting is having an influence. A 40% increase is amazing. It shows the agency's workload.

Deputy Rabbitte asked whether staff, especially front-line staff, have the necessary tools to do the business. They are certainly much better equipped than they were. For example, an IT system has been in place since last July that is integrated across the entire system and the entire country. The general response from staff who input information is that the system is a huge advantage. Staff members have been provided with the devices they need. Perhaps I should not make a blanket statement to that effect, but certainly a very large number of them have. That is being advanced all the time.

On the question of work experience, I would not rule out any dimension in addressing this shortage. Speaking of information technology and the tools of the trade, maybe there are straightforward administrative staff who could take some of the burden off social workers and let them focus on the professional area where they are needed. I would not rule anything out. However I am frustrated by pressure on the agency from different quarters, which I fully understand, to repair gaps in the service. This critique comes with the acknowledgement that there is a shortage of social workers, not only here, but across the western world. Regardless of that, we should somehow be able to address the gaps. We are not showing any urgency about doing that. If we aimed to have a similar number of social workers per thousand people here as in England, we would have to address a shortage of 1,500 social workers. There is no point in my telling the committee that we need another 1,500 social workers, or in the agency preparing a workforce plan that says so. That is simply because we are not going to get them. They are not there. In those circumstances, we have to look at creative solutions. I would not rule out any of them, but there is a great need for more urgency in progressing this. As Deputy Sherlock said, this involves the Department of Education and Skills. We are competing with the HSE and non-governmental organisations, NGOs, for the 215 social workers turned out every year by the traditional universities. We have circumstances where somebody wants to switch to an NGO after working for Tusla for two or three years. There is always going to be movement of staff in and out, no matter what we do. We can certainly work at strategies for retention and making the job more attractive. Deputy Rabbitte may well be right that there are possibilities in allowing social workers to focus on the professional job that is their priority.