Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:

Going back to the resourcing question, Mr. Cronin has alluded to this in a number of the points he made. It is a constant struggle because the reality is that it is an extraordinary context that requires an extraordinary response. Again, rather than looking at the costs, as has been said by previous contributors, it is an investment in young people. From our perspective, and Dr. Liston mentioned it already, we have to fundraise about €250,000 per year to enable us to roll out the programmes but that enables us to provide more than 100 children per week with individual therapeutic supports that make a huge difference to the children's long-term educational outcomes and life outcomes. In my opinion, it is a very small investment.

We are constantly looking at how we can co-ordinate and align our services better. For example, we have a local Garda youth diversion project funded through the Department of justice. It runs an equine programme. We have a number of children with additional needs, children with cerebral palsy and children with Down's syndrome who engage with that horseriding programme every Friday. Again, that is based on relationships with our local Garda youth diversion project. There is no statutory framework or interdepartmental policy that enables us to do that. Again, it comes back to the point around relationships.

I mentioned this previously, and will probably be shot for saying this, but I do not see the problem as being money. I see it as being how we align our resources and how we co-ordinate the funding because it is all so siloed. There is a pocket of funding with Tusla and with the HSE and there is justice funding and education funding. There are significant sums of money still within the economy and the Exchequer. Again, it comes back to how we co-ordinate it. On the ground, we see in some of our communities that when it is done well, it can make a huge difference in the lives of so many children. We hear so much about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, that children need to be protected, nurtured and empowered. That is a distant reality when we see the lives so many children in this country are now leading.