Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to respond in writing to that point once I get that correspondence from the Deputy.

With regard to schools, I absolutely take the point. As the Deputy knows, schools and childcare facilities remain open all the way up to level five, and that is because of their importance from an educational point of view but also from a socialising point of view for children and young people. There is that balance between what happens in school - which I do not want to say is a completely controlled environment because it is not always that way, but a reasonably controlled environment - and what happens at the matches that take place afterwards, which everyone will accept are more difficult to control. I take the Deputy’s point. Even the decision to move to level three was a decision the Cabinet thought long and hard about because there are implications for the wider economy to put those restrictions on sport, and this is relevant to children, adults and to anybody who relies on some element of sport to chill out and to clear their head. I absolutely take that point.

In the roadmap on Resilience and Recovery, there are specific elements about children and young people which are informed by research, including the SpunOut research and earlier research done by my Department. Throughout the pandemic, we have been doing research and I am a strong believer in having a research base to inform the policies we follow. Both in terms of research and advocacy, I am certainly making those points at Cabinet. I have met the alliance for mental health and we have discussed those broad areas where investment is needed, and there are commitments in that regard in the programme for Government. I have been seeing early intervention organisations such as Jigsaw, which does great work, and obviously there are the more significant situations where people need to move over to CAMHS and such services. I absolutely understand and support the importance of investment in those areas.