Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that with the caveat that there has to be a continued engagement over decades because when area-based partnerships were set up as the local development companies, as they were in the 1990s, it was for this very reason to bring together the ETBs, the HSE and so on. What happened was the rank of official, particularly within the HSE, reduced over time. Fewer people who were able to make decisions were attending. Different officials were sent all the time. Then it got to the point when a strategic decision was made to withdraw from them. Those local development companies were essentially turned into service level agreement delivery organisations for social protection and, guess what? We need a new area-based intervention and here we are now with this model. Given the position Tusla is in, it has wide access to the children who are directly impacted.

I will turn to an issue that I have had a lot of interaction on. It relates to another recommendation in the Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures report, which is to try to target children who are, although I hate that term, involved in school avoidance who might be placed on reduced timetables by schools, and who may come from very problematic homes and are not engaging with school. I compliment Oliver Callan from RTÉ who covered this area really well earlier this week. I was with St. John's Education Centre, which provides a school intervention programme where it takes children out of school for six weeks and works with the child and sends the child back to school. It was established by the La Salle trust and by the Holy Faith Sisters and it is now looking to try to be mainstreamed. I believe Jacinta Stewart in the Department of Education has carried out a review in this area and proposals will come forward. Again, there is an opportunity for Tusla to feed in there because while it is dealing with some of the most vulnerable children, in some cases they are the same children, but in others these interventions prevent that next step. If Tusla could add its voice to those interventions-----