Ms Siobhan Greene:

What Senator Ruane has said resonates with what I said earlier about parents being the key adults in their children's lives. That is very important, and regardless of whether children stay in care until they are 18, their parents will still be the key adults in their lives. Invariably, research tells us children return home to live in the family environment so we have to find ways to continue that attachment and relationship. I agree that where birth parents - although I do not like that term - are actively involved in foster care experiences, invariably they are more successful.

There is a variety of reasons that does not happen. I do not know enough about the foster care system and another colleagues might talk to that better than I would but we need to be really clear with foster carers around expectations of access and the importance of that. Maybe the importance of maintaining that relationship is misunderstood and why it is an important thing to do. Rather than seeing that a child might be unsettled because of a visit, trying to explore what that is about and helping to get some healing around that in a different kind of way would probably a good thing.

Around the cultural sensitivity point, I think the Senator is absolutely right. We have a huge journey to go on in Ireland regarding that. We are invariably - at least in my organisation - white females, and that is something we are thinking about even within Barnardos. We are looking at our profile of service users and how we change that. I do not think that is unique to foster carers or social workers. We are in a changing Ireland and we need to think about how that applies. I say that generally but Ms McCarthy may want to say something specific.