Ms Gráinne Cullen:

Two other things come to mind when the Senator mentions the supports around the family and the link to the schools. A lot of our schools have home school community liaison officers. Their job is to make sure that that link between the school, the community and the family is happening. That is their role within the DEIS programme. We have had a number of those posts in non-DEIS schools as well over the past few years.

As regards the other aspect, I met recently, when we were doing the link worker piece, with one of the Traveller projects. This one was in Tuam. We were looking at the work those projects can also do to support those families as regards the local knowledge. When the Senator mentioned feuding, this group came to mind because this Traveller project had done a lot of work in the community across the different feuding families, etc., and then linking the children back into the school system. The Senator is absolutely right. There are gangs in the settled community too. This is not unique to the Traveller community. At the same time, however, many families in a Travelling community would be in the same area and, therefore, probably in the same school. I think there is something we can do to work very closely with the projects, which is part of what we are trying to do with the forum, and then these link workers, our home school community liaison and our school completion programme. Ms O'Neill has mentioned the REALTs and the response as regards Ukraine. It is a matter of trying to look at having a local response such that you can co-ordinate the resources that sometimes are already there but are maybe just not linking up. I thought I would mention that.