Ms Cherie Tyner:

I thank Deputy Cairns. I shall address the Deputy's first question around the strength of parents.

I spoke to one of the founders of ParentsPlus. She was a consultant psychiatrist who subsequently retired. She put it very well when she said parents know what is best for their own family and we should respect parents and value that. She said professionals do not always have the solutions and we need to work together to define what goals families will work towards to achieve for themselves. That is exactly what Progressing Disability is about.

Our approach is about empowering parents to realise they are their own resource. That is not to say they will not get speech and language therapy, occupational therapy or any of the other very important and critical services. However, at the end of the day, the family needs to be empowered. The focus of each of our programmes, from the early years right through to the programme for families affected by intellectual disability or parenting when separated, which has three strands, is empowering the parent to support the child and improve outcomes, parents' self-care and looking at the whole family. I will let Ms Ní Raghallaigh or one of the parents speak more succinctly about that. That might tie in well with the piece around understaffing.

With regard to the special needs programme in particular, we are now working with services to identify parents who can be co-facilitators of this evidence-based programme. Ms Kerrigan is one of them and Mr. McSweeney is another. The beauty of that is having parents and a professional, Ms Ní Raghallaigh, who is a speech and language therapist trained in all of the programmes and sees the impact. She has worked in the HSE for 20-odd years. I apologise for giving away her secrets. She has worked in a special school and sees the value of working with families in this way. She has steered much of this as well and parents feel respect. Not every parent is in a position to become a co-facilitator, but we recognise the value that can add. The parents can speak to that further.

With regard to the question around understaffing, there are a number of issues. There has been significant research to show that very often when resources are slim, what will create the biggest impact is the thing that is pulled first. We have said, and Mr. Buttery has talked about it, that all the evidence shows the impact parents can make to improve outcomes when they are given evidence-based tools tailored to their family. It shows the impact not just for the child with disability, but the siblings in the house who may be mini-carers at the age of four or security guards in Tesco who make sure the child does not flee. That community is significant.

From our experience of working with this charity and all of the work we have done with the services for 25 years, especially in disability services, they are contacting us to say they do not have funding to train in our programme. We know what it is happening. It is not a criticism. We feel panicked, because we are trying to get money to fund them to deliver the programmes. It is not a churn and burn, with which I have an issue. We cannot just throw money at it to get everyone trained in these parenting programmes. It is about the planning and working to build clusters of networks in communities across services. I might only have one speech and language therapist on my team who is available to train in the programme, but someone else might have an occupational therapist in another town. It is about post-training implementation support.

We have an evidence-based quality protocol built into the programme. We are building up the skills of the progressing disability network teams in order that they will have the ability to track outcomes and evaluate themselves. We give two free supervision sessions, post training, because we have recognised that all the evidence shows that once a supervision component is added, that is where the magic happens. We could charge for it, but our focus is on impact.

Maybe Mr. McSweeney or Ms Kerrigan wishes to add something about their experience as parents and about the focus on the strengths of parents and empowering them through the programmes they have attended. Maybe they will speak about becoming facilitators.