Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:

What the Deputy has described sounds like the perfect post-Covid storm. She mentioned the child disability service, which is overwhelmed. Tusla is overwhelmed. The education and welfare service is completely overwhelmed. Coming back to Mr. Cronin's point, we talk a lot about the value of education but so many of the families we work with operate on a needs-basis, meaning the need to survive. There are days when families are overwhelmed, understandably. If you have four or five children, one of whom has additional needs, and are in a homeless hub or if you are struggling with the pain of addiction, school and the value of education are not priorities. On Mr. Cronin's point, it is about joining up the dots and ensuring we are getting in the appropriate services to support children so they can get to school.

In my experience, parents do not want their children at home. They want them in school. Children want to be in school, too. They want the connection, the love and the relationships. It is like the story of the little boy with the football. He just wanted to be in school and connected to somebody. Mr. Cronin made an important point in respect of the issue around attendance and services being overwhelmed. I am not talking about the punitive measures that education and welfare officers can put in place. I am talking about the preventative and supportive measures. That work is not happening at the moment because education and welfare officers are overwhelmed with school refusals and exclusions and reduced timetables. That preventative work is not happening. There is a massive amount of firefighting going on.

The situation is similar within Tusla. God knows where the threshold now is for intervention in the context of child protection services. Nobody seems to know. We can see the cases that are slipping through the cracks. Sadly, we have seen the result of that in recent weeks. We see that, as I am sure Mr. Cronin does, on a daily basis. It is frightening.