Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

If extra money is needed for foster care it is very welcome in the context of the need to increase payments, but perhaps I am a little naive to hope that it is also a reflection of an increased number of foster carers. There is an absolutely huge need to improve the conditions of foster carers in order that we can recruit more foster carers. We absolutely need more foster carers.

The Minister spoke of the challenge of urgent placements, but there is a real challenge facing Tusla where it is relying on private placements for foster care and residential care, in that they just do not offer the same value for money. Certainly with private foster care placements, there is a huge marginal cost. The children are frequently placed much further away, which eats into that most precious of social work resources, which is the social worker's time. This impacts on the young people who are removed from their communities.

We seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of paying huge sums of money to private providers while getting much less value for money. What action is being taken to address the reliance on the private sector for the provision of foster care and residential care placements?

The Minister's opening statement also made reference to the complexity of cases coming in. One of the issues that Bernard Gloster spoke about when he was CEO of Tusla was that the unmet needs of children with disabilities was having an impact on the number of children coming into care and on the complexity of their needs when they come into care. Overlapping the remit of both of the Ministers we have in front of us is this issue of the complexity of cases. There is a need to support young people in care and to recognise that the trauma of coming into care creates further needs. How are we meeting that specific and special need of young people in care? Equally, that increased complexity is only happening because our disability services are not providing services in the first place. Certainly, the CDNT on the Armagh Road in my constituency, with which I am sure the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, is deeply familiar, has had huge problems with staffing. There is a belief among some parents that the team is simply being wound down and this is why no new staff are coming in. I welcome the extra funding the Minister talked about but when will the families feel the benefit of this extra money? Certainly, they do not seem to be getting any benefit from the existing funding in terms of services or service delivery.