Ms Kate Duggan:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. As we have said, Mr. Brophy might expand on that in terms of the foster care. I think part of it is linked to the Deputy's second question about building trust within the agency and within the community. When I came into this job, I said at our tenth anniversary event that I had a painting in my office of a horse. In one of the first visits I did when I was in my job, I visited a particular area and a young boy came up to me and had a gift for me. He had painted a picture. He was a young boy from the Traveller community. On the back of the picture he wrote:

To Kate,

Thank you to you and Tusla for changing my life.

I talk about that because he was a member of the Travelling community and, because he got to experience a culturally sensitive placement, his life had transformed and turned around. That is the only picture in my office. In terms of our determination, it is a matter of knowing what good looks like in terms of supporting this community. As an agency, over the past four or five years, our absolute commitment has been to foster care generally. Five years ago, we were a European leader in that 90% of our children in care were in foster care. We are now down at about 87% of children in care. What we see generally is a challenge in recruiting foster carers in this country. We have put a significant amount of investment, with the support of the Government, into development of our fostering services, and a big strand of that is ensuring we can promote. As the Deputy said, those figures seem low, but for-----