Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)

All right. If the Minister was willing to give any information, I would be only too delighted. I would just like to see where the assessment of need process is going as regards delivery. The Minister has to play a huge part in that.

In regard to foster care, again, the problem with some of these issues is that they cross many Departments. Sometimes we have the issue of guardianship and payments, which needs to be resolved in social protection, but it needs to be looked at. I get the sense we do not have enough foster carers. We were speaking about special emergency arrangements and while these are imperfect, there are also situations where we do not have the capacity to take kids out of circumstances that are not good. I understand that the idea needs to be to try to maintain the family unit, but there are times when action needs to be taken and I am not always sure we are in that place. Is there anything we can do about this?

The Minister spoke about early supports and Tusla. That is work this committee will do. We have spoken about planning-for-life-type schemes. Springboard, when it operated in my constituency, was able to focus on a smaller number of families and was probably able to deliver a far better result. We have been talking about dealing with underlying child poverty. What are the Minister's aims in regard to that? Some of these issues have been brought up when we talk about early learning and childcare. We all know there is an insufficient amount of it and at this stage TDs are receiving calls from people who cannot access services.

I have a question about AIM and afterschool. Due to the way some crèches I know of operate, they have dropped below the ratio. They have put rooms aside to be sensory rooms and by taking kids with challenges, they probably end up with more. A very specific piece needs to be done on that.