Ms Saoirse Brady:

Prevention and early intervention are important. To follow on from Dr. O'Mahony's point, the area-based childhood programmes have now been taken into Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, and they specialise in prevention and early intervention. That will form part of Tusla's wider work, which is welcome. Senator Black is correct that there needs to be a more joined-up approach and that needs to happen well before there is any crisis. It is evident from Carol Coulter's childcare law reporting project that parental addiction and alcohol abuse plays a part in many of the cases she has seen come before the courts. A number of helpful measures have been put in place. I am so used to talking about the Public Health (Alcohol) Bill that I forget it is now an Act but measures such as that will hopefully help address some of the addiction issues. We now have an early years strategy, First 5, and that is built in there as well, so in addition to the affordable childcare scheme we will see provision for vulnerable families. A number of agencies will be tasked with identifying those families and providing them with quality full-time childcare to help with the family support piece and prevention and early intervention because if one can get children into a good quality service such as that, where there are wraparound services, it can identify those problems earlier, signal them to Tusla and try to put in place the family support and parental support programmes that are needed in order to address them.

There is some work happening. We can send the committee further information on it. We will be launching our report card next week, which will deal with some of those issues. The committee will see how we can join up some of the existing work, which might be useful for its own report.