Ms Kate Duggan:

First, last year 90% of our children in care were in foster care. We are, as a country, a European leader in terms of being able to have 90% of children in care in foster care. Similar to the residential strategy that we developed, one of the things that we did and put an awful lot of time into back in 2022 - and I personally met between 500 and 600 foster carers during that period - was to look to see what did our strategy need to be to sustain 90% of children in foster care or even seeking to improve that percentage. One part of that was around the allowance. The allowance was increased in this year's budget for the first time since 2009. One issue they have concerns pensions and their pension entitlements. The Department of Social Protection are looking at that matter.

The biggest issue was the supports that they could get for the children in their care in terms of access to therapeutic supports and prioritisation for access to therapeutic supports. That will be a feature of the interagency group, namely, how do we seek to get them prioritised. From our allocation last year, we made a decision to prioritise for the first time ever a national fostering lead within the agency. That person is now leading out on how we better support foster carers across the agency and working with foster carers on that.

We have, for the first time, introduced a peer support model. We have recruited into Tusla six foster parents to work with us on offering support to foster carers and new foster carers in the regions. We also are looking at how we standardise the supports that we give go foster carers.

This week is fostering awareness week. It is a significant campaign that aims to recruit foster carers and recruit in a changing social environment. For example, how do we recruit people today who are working, who are single or who are in same-sex relationships? These people might not know that they could become foster carers. As we want to support and recruit them, we have a huge focus on that in the agency at the moment. Today, we have well over 3,800 foster care families who are the spine of the care system and, for all of us, look after those children in care so well and we certainly want to do better by them.