Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am mindful that if we are in a position where the allocations go to the highest need, then the client load of each social worker will be more complex and there are not perhaps easy wins which give initial job reward to keep going and to keep their heart up. I would be concerned about things like that.

I have one last question for the Minister and I thank Ms Duggan very much. The Minister reported with regard to the St. John Ambulance Ireland and I very much appreciate that. I am not going to get into anything because we will be told off by the Chair.

I would say two things. First, what have we learned about the safeguarding? We had a very frank and excellent session with Tusla, but one of the things that has come out of this has been the lack of teeth in child protection when it comes to non-statutory funding. Obviously that is up in the air and there is a bit of a dispute about that with regard to that particular organisation. For organisations in general where there is a child protection obligation but no teeth to enforce it in the way there would be with a different organisation where there is at least the withholding of funding, among other things, what have we learned from that and what is the plan to address that?

Second, I do not believe a counselling service is a service, even where there is a list of people you can go to and they will contact an organisation to say Mary has been in touch and we are going to give them hours. However, where there is also highly contentious and aggressive litigation going on, I do not believe that is a service, to be perfectly honest. I would be interested in the safeguarding issue, however. Where do we give that teeth and where is that going?