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

A significant additional investment overall in Tusla this year of more than €41 million extra follows on from the largest ever increase Tusla received last year of €66 million.

Much of that focused on the recruitment of additional staff. As the Deputy said, there will be more than 280 new staff recruited to Tusla in 2022, with 100 of them front-line staff and 48 of them related to residential placements, with which we know there is a significant issue.

In terms of how that breaks down to resourcing the information and tracing legislation, 30 of those staff will be allocated to the implementation of the information and tracing legislation. A genealogist is included in that group thus recognising that a wider range of skills and expertise are needed within Tusla to fully implement the range of tasks and responsibilities that it will have. Tusla will be better empowered to undertake tracing with the statutory basis that it will be given under the information and tracing legislation. I know from my engagement with groups who represent adopted people, they felt that the genealogist skills was one that the organisation lacked, and that is something which is recognised by myself and the chief executive.

Please note that we have provided an extra allocation to the Adoption Authority of Ireland of €1.3 million to allow it to undertake its functions under the information and tracing legislation. That will allow for the hiring of additional staff, a new head of records, a new archivist, and new administrative staff to provide support. The money allocated to AAI and Tusla will support both organisations with the information campaign that will be rolled out, once the legislation is passed, to inform parents, adopted people and people who have questions about their birth and origin, and about their rights under the provision of the new legislation.

On the provision of core funding under the early years allocation, the allocation has been significantly increased and the central part of that is core funding. A sum of €16 million has been provided this year and that will equate in a full year, in 2023, to €207 million.

In terms of adequacy, core funding supports services because we recognise that many services struggle in terms of their own sustainability. We want to enable the payment of better wages for staff. We want to be able to deliver on the pay scales that we believe will be provided by the Joint Labour Committee and the employment regulation order, which I hope will be agreed soon between employer and employee representatives but that requires the State stepping up with this very significant additional investment. The quid pro quofor that, with services, is the agreement to freeze fees. For the first time in the history of the State, we now have a mechanism to stop the increase in fees that we had seen, particularly dramatically prior to Covid. If one considers the level of fee increases in the last two years, they have actually been quite small. In 2021, it was only about a 1% fee increase on average. That is primarily because of the very significant State support that was provided through the employment wage subsidy scheme, EWSS, which meant that services were sustainable and did not have to increase their fees. The EWSS will be withdrawn by the end of April. The new core funding will kick in from September of next year. The allocation also contains a bridging or transition fund of €37 million, which will continue to support the sustainability of services in May to August of this year.

We are very clear that this is not the end of our investment in this area because, as the Deputy rightly said, we need to ensure we can cut the cost and enhance affordability for parents. The first step towards that is a fee freeze and the next stop is increased investment in the national childcare scheme, NCS, that directs subventions parents receive. I have been very clear, and I think that all three parties in government are very clear, that in the next budget and in following budgets we want to see significant additional investment in the NCS. We saw the beginning of that this year in terms of the removal of the wraparound hours, which will kick in spring and benefit about 5,000 children from disadvantaged families. We will see the next part of that in September of this year when the increase of the universal subvention from three up to 15 years kicks in, which will benefit thousands of families. We are very clear that more money will continue to go into the NCS and because we will now have a fee freeze, parents will see the difference. I say that because, as we saw in previous years, when the Government put more money into the NCS it was immediately eroded by fee increases that service providers implemented.

Finally, in terms of redress, the allocation for redress is not contained in these Estimates. It will be the subject of a Revised Estimate, I imagine, for 2022 and then, I suppose, the subhead will be built in from budget 2023 onwards. The final package on redress was not agreed at the time of the budget. As members will know, we announced it in November of this year following the budget. We hope to be in a position to enable people to start to draw down payments in 2022 about which I am absolutely determined. I will work with the committee and everyone else to make sure the legislation gets through the Oireachtas as quickly as possible but at that point, it will be the subject, I imagine, of a supplementary Estimate.