Mr. Bernard Cantillon:

We have a shortage of access social workers. I cannot speak for every area in Tusla but certainly the experience of social workers in Dublin is that there are not enough social care workers on the teams to be able to facilitate access. Because social workers ultimately carry responsibility for the case and the legal responsibility for the case, when they return to court to explain what is happening in a case, it is almost impossible for them to say they could not facilitate the access with a young person and his or her parent or that it did not happen because they had other things to do. The courts obviously would find that unacceptable. Social workers do not want to cancel children's time with their families to do other things, so the social worker ends up doing it, but the stress of the job then becomes unbearable and social workers leave.