Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
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Yes, Deputy Rabbitte, there were a number of areas, both in terms of my priorities, which I indicated to Tusla, as well as its own. The key priorities are obviously an increase in staff, with the recruitment of 442 new staff. It wants to respond to expected further increases in referrals following the introduction of mandatory reporting. There will be a further expansion of the Tusla out-of-hours social work service, as I indicated in my opening statement. The Deputy also referred to the increase in the number of and the expansion of the family resource centres.

There will be the completion of the much awaited national child care information system which I know the Deputy will be happy to hear about. I can speak a little bit more about that if the members so wish. There is further development in terms of the domestic, sexual and gender-based violence services. We will be adding an additional service for that work as well as supporting increased resources to ones that currently exist. There will be a focus on therapy services, the educational welfare services and of course, the strengthening of the current governance and management support services for Tusla.

We have not had the opportunity to speak about a new development, which we put in place last year. We will continue to provide services to unaccompanied minors. We are working on a plan to receive unaccompanied minors from Italy and Greece. We have received as many as will be coming from Calais and we have built the capacity and the expertise so that right now there are plans to do that as well.