Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:

From a cost perspective, the social return on the investment that you are making is absolutely huge. For what I would consider a relatively small investment, if you were to equate it with what it costs to keep a child in residential care or State care, it is a drop in the ocean. The Sky is the Limit is the tag line we use, but ultimately it is about multi-agency work on the ground, joining up the dots and co-ordinating services. It is something we are very good at talking about but we are not that good at doing on the ground.

We are fortunate within our community that there are a lot of agencies that have bought into that multi-agency approach. I used the example a while ago of riding for the disabled where the local Garda diversion project is supporting us with that. Its members are working with some other members of vulnerable families but they are able to work with some of the children on a Friday, and these children are getting an opportunity to head out every Friday morning. It is one example of how you can join up the dots.

For me, permanent school-based multidisciplinary teams are the only way to go, and not as short-term pilot schemes. We know what works. We see the difference. I come back to that social return on the investment that we are making. It is absolutely huge. It is the bare minimum these children deserve and require. The Senator herself mentioned it. When you look at the waiting lists for AONs, they will hit close to 25,000. When you look at how children have been bounced between primary care teams, CDNTs and CAMHS, with them floundering, for example, in areas of Limerick, and waiting three years now for an autism assessment and two years for an initial appointment, we have to do better than that. I firmly believe that having school-based multidisciplinary teams, collapsing the silos and enabling Departments to have collapsible funding streams where you can jointly commission pieces of work between health, education, justice, Tusla or whatever, is where we can make the real gains. I see the benefits of that daily through the work that we are doing and I would love to see more of that happening in schools all over the country.