Ms Ger Kenny:

Regarding the plan and the parent information talks, the cost of that is a Zoom licence for a month - even one talk per month. The cost is the speaker and a Zoom licence, and that is it, per county. Why can that not be rolled out? I try to reach out with the plan to as many families as possible. It has gone not only nationwide but also international. I get requests to join the plan's Facebook page. As I said, realistically, that is no major expense. Surely a few bob could be found and each county would know that it was Plan Longford, Plan Athlone and so on. Why can the money not be found? I and two other parents run this on a voluntary basis. We source the speakers. We get the best of speakers in. We alternate between doing it on Zoom and in person at a very small cost. Surely that would not take an awful lot of planning, and each county would feel that it has something. The presentation slides are emailed to the families afterwards so they can go over them again.

I was asked to do that by Tusla, which we are grateful has continued to fund that. I was asked to do it and I did not know where I would start. I enrolled a couple of other parents, we put our heads together and it has been a great success four years on. We have plans for Balbriggan and I am working online helping them to source speakers, which we share. We have plans for Dublin 5, Dublin 13 and Dublin 17 as well. Those are three plan groups so surely it is an easy thing to roll out to other counties.