Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise that I missed some of the beginning of the meeting because I was speaking in the Chamber. I apologise if I am repeating things.

The witnesses spoke in their opening statement about the national policy environment for prevention and early intervention. One of the things I would like to get their insight into is that over the last few years, Tusla has put much effort into realigning its early intervention. I appreciate that not every adverse childhood experience, or harm caused by poverty that we are looking to prevent, will be the sort of harm that will end up in front of a social worker or on a social worker’s caseload. We need to be careful not to say that every harm needs child protection response. However, Tulsa acknowledges that. It put much effort into the prevention, partnership and family support, PPFS, and the Meitheal. There was concern as these were being set up and rolled out that much of this was an unfunded mandate, so to speak. The work Tusla should have been doing was pushed onto community groups without necessarily putting funding behind them. The family resource centres were often involved in these. Not all the family resource centres were being properly resourced or structured to do this.

I would love to hear the network’s experience of the roll-out of the PPFS and Meitheal. Did it help prevention and family support? Is it a weakness? Where are the weaknesses in it? What do we need to look at?

Generally, what has worked well? We have spoken about a couple of ideas here. The network has spoken about endless piloting, which I must admit, brought a wry smile to my face. However, in regard to the idea of endless piloting, what has worked well? What did we pilot that worked well but which to which we never went back? What are the obvious tricks that we are missing here?