Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh na finnéithe. Tá brón orm; two questions came up early. The fault was not mine, it was actually the fault of those who did not show up for theirs. We have all been dealing with issues of children and children's rights. From time to time, there is a need to absolutely ensure these are fulfilled. That is not always the case. The witnesses have spoken about the necessity of a family homelessness strategy. There are varying issues. Sometimes the witnesses have to deal with them. They talked about cases where some children are not necessarily getting their rights from an educational perspective, particularly with regard to their disabilities and all the rest. There is then the issue of those who grow up in abject disadvantage and poverty. At times, if you pick particular eircodes in this State, you will have embedded poverty, multigenerational poverty and the issues of crime, addiction and all the rest of it. Some children just get dealt a really poor hand.

We had the Children's Rights Alliance in here and it spoke of the necessity of having specialised health nurses, and I think there is a plan for that. The idea was that every child and every family would have access to such a nurse and problems could be caught early. I suspect Dr. Muldoon's view is that we have an insufficient number of interventions and family support inventions that are absolutely necessary. If we could have some of these in play, we might not need Tusla to do some of the more difficult pieces later. I have my own view and, as much as it is within Tusla's remit that first and foremost family units should be maintained, I have seen many circumstances where I do not believe this was utterly beneficial for the children or the wider family. In the end, children ended up being taken away but that was after a lot of harm had been done. In some of those cases, I would be very worried about the long term impact of that.