Ms Cherie Tyner:

There were three questions when the evidence piece is added. In terms of what is needed, in our experience over 25 years, having worked with more than 1,000 services and professionals, it is funding. If I were to ring the office now, there will have been a phone call from somebody looking for funding to train in our programmes. Regarding disability services, we need senior management buy-in. It is almost like we need a campaign of education for professionals on the urgency and importance of delivering parenting interventions that are tailored to the needs of families. We are talking in the context of disability, which means it is needed from the early years and it must be accessible and equitable. Families contact me saying they saw on an online board forum that someone was doing the Parents Plus special needs programme or the early years programme and they ask us where can they get it. We are either able to signpost them or not. It is unfair.

I have come back to the charitable sector, not because I do not like the commercial sector, but because I see the value, social impact and what we can do with resources that are not huge but also with a coming together of minds. It is about collaboration and post-training implementation support, embedding skills within teams, and understanding education for services that are not going to run an eight-week group with 14 parents but will get value from this training which they will bring to their individual practice. Public health nurses are always saying the programmes are perfect for them because, in a household where there is a baby or a toddler, they are able to draw on different aspect tailored to the needs of that family.

We have significant experience in building those interagency networks, for example Parenting Monaghan, the Parent Hub Donegal and Parenting Cavan. At the moment funding has stopped for the mid-west. The parenting and separated project that came through a number of services in Limerick and beyond started through recommendations from some of the judges in the area. We are funding that. In regard to the question on Family Carers Ireland there are actually a number of funding streams. However, that is a piece of a bigger picture that we are working on.

During lockdown, if life was bad before it, life was really bad. I am not allowed to say that but horrific things happened to families. As a charity we had to respond to that. We had to recognise that we were driving this into a space that nobody could see. If we do not see it then we can forget about it. We cannot forget about it because we are answering the phone every day. We recognised that we needed to support families to access evidence-based programmes. Therefore, we worked with Parentline and started funding online delivery of our programmes accessible through that organisation. Such was the impact of that work that we applied for and gratefully received €300,000 from the RTÉ "Late Late Toy Show" programme to expand because the need was so significant. Within that we have expanded our work for online direct delivery to parents of our programmes. They can decide what they need, whether it is adolescence, early years, separation, our ADHD programme or the special needs programme. That is through Parentline, ADHD Ireland, Family Carers Ireland and now we are expanding into the network of family resource centres as well.

We are meant to reach 2,000 children and parents in that project. We had to close the waiting list within a couple of days because the need was so big. I know we are here today only to talk about disability, parenting interventions and family centred practice but I am telling the committee members that families need more than a leaflet. They need more than a little bit of information. They are crying out. We have this idea that parenting interventions are only for a certain cohort of society. That is rubbish. Maybe I am not speaking eloquently about it but I am vexed.