Mr. Jim Shanahan:

I have been quiet all day. I feel a bit inadequate because I do not work in education. However, I have been a member of the board of St. James's for 20 years and I have been the chair for 15, so I see what happens on a daily basis. What I have heard from all the members are questions about what we can do better and the cost of it. I work in the public service. I work for the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. A big buzz word in the public service is "innovation". What these people are saying is that the system is broken and is not working. We have too many different agencies, budgets and other things that are not joined up and are not causing a good outcome. The people who are suffering are the children and the families of the most vulnerable. What innovation would mean in this context is leadership and commitment from central Government. We need to get stakeholders into a room and around a table to discuss the needs of the children, the best therapies and resources for them, and then to develop a model that would work for everybody.

Nothing ever works perfectly but if a model is developed that all agencies are committed to, then you start discussing the cost of providing that solution and how to allocate it across the agencies. It is not rocket science, as Mr. O'Neill said. It is to get all the stakeholders together and have a commitment to develop a model that will work and give a better outcome for children and families because they are the people who do it. These two schools are amazing examples of what can be done with limited resources by being very creative. With more resources and joined-up thinking applied across all schools in the system, there would be a much better outcome for all of the children who need it.