Mr. John Dunne:

In fairness to public health nurses, they are scarce on the ground and are run off their feet. From our experience, they are very good if you can get them, and that is not a criticism of them. We are involved in a project, about which we are very hopeful, that trains GPs to look out for carers. All they have to do is refer the carers to us and we will take it from there. It is about connecting carers. Far too often, carers arrive too late at our door. They come home to Ireland to look after someone in their family and by the time they come to us, they have lost the capacity to claim carer's benefit because there was a break in their transition to social welfare. People come to us who have crocked their back because they never got patient moving and handling training. Their back might recover somewhat but it will never be quite the same. Usually, people come to us when they are in trouble and the trick is to spot them beforehand. Public health nurses and, hopefully, GPs will be important and useful in signposting that. We have to be ready at the other end to meet, greet and serve carers.

Last year, the Government provided funding for a carer guarantee, an initiative that we have been talking about for a long time. At the moment, it is a bit of a postcode lottery, but there are certain services careers should be able to access wherever they are in the country.

We are happy to take responsibility for delivering those services. I do not say that lightly. To try to scale this up to a national level is a scary prospect, but someone has to do it, and nobody else is really available.

To answer Deputy McAuliffe's question directly, public health nurses are good but they are not always there. GPs would be a very helpful second round. As for the other supports, I may be misunderstanding this, but we have a team of staff around the country working in communities, and part of their brief is not to duplicate everything but to try to identify the supports that are in each community and that might be useful in order that when carers comes to us, while we will not necessarily do the providing, we can point them to the right person.