Mr. Bernard Gloster:

To be complete, we have children who come into respite care. They live at home with families and we pay respite carers to look after them. We then have children in care who go for respite. If they are children with a disability, they go to a HSE respite service. We now continue the foster care allowance for foster carers while they are in the respite service. When I came here, that was raised with me by many foster carers and the ombudsman and application was sporadic. That has been resolved.

We have children in care who do not have a disability but either the child or the foster carers might need respite, or a break. Do we have enough of that? I would not think so. Where we have it and where we can work it into the care plan, we support the foster carer as well as the respite carer to do that. There were debates about that before.

I will come back to the Deputy's fundamental point about what we are doing to standardise. This will involve a question on which we have not yet landed on a final decision. If we set out the rules by which foster carers are supported, whether public or private, and we pay for one, two, three, four or five, it would be great but I can guarantee that within a day of those being published a need would emerge to push the system to go outside those rules. The minute we go outside those rules, there is inconsistency. The question will be how much discretion we can give our local teams versus how much rigidity we bring to the rules. The more discretion we have, the more inconsistency there will be. That is the challenge for us but we can make a fundamental improvement.

I am very confident that any absence of standardisation in the apparent or experienced difference of foster carers between public and private can be eradicated or reduced. The child in care with a private foster carer or a Tusla foster carer always has a Tusla social worker. The experience is on a supported level.

I am certainly keen for us to take out any possibility of that being different.