Dr. Niall Muldoon:

It is a tricky one to come up with and I might not have enough of the facts to come up with a proper solution but again, from our point of view this was being raised four or five years ago. The genesis of this problem was the closing down of the high support units. We had three of those with 20-odd beds around the country and we closed them down and kept neither the beds nor the expertise. We thought we would survive with only special care. We created that. That was a Tusla policy. It decided to close them. We saw within two years that was not going to work because we had a whole range of children who had options through high support as opposed to special care and they are now falling through the cracks. They are the children who are causing trouble. They are possibly ending up in the justice system out in Oberstown instead of being given a therapeutic intervention.

The whole concept of special care is so wonderful. The idea is you go in and get a short, sharp intervention with therapeutic support, they wrap everything around you and you get an opportunity then to take a breath, reset yourself and go back to where you were. That is the whole idea. It is not meant to be a long-term solution for anything. For us it is a real failure of the system that we have to hire security, but I can understand if we do not have the bodies. I am aware Tusla is trying to change the way it sees things. It is creating social work assistants and social work apprenticeships so people can be fast-streamed to become social workers. It is trying new initiatives but I am just sorry it did not try them even five years ago because we would be in a different situation now.

I do not have anything to add to that so I will ask my colleagues.