Ms Suzanne Connolly:

To give some context, my background is social work and I have spent the past 30 years involved in delivering services to children and families. Notwithstanding the fact that I think online services have a future and are meeting a need, as Mr. Church highlighted, I feel passionately about in-person services for vulnerable children and their parents and the importance of delivering those services where children and families can access them. It is important to see what is happening in the home and to have a warm, welcoming service in a centre. We need to be there for the long haul for children and families because some children have had multiple traumas in their early life and need intensive services and service provision. We also need to be very careful, particularly when talking about children, as we cannot separate their overall development from their mental health needs because if children have anxiety, it affects their education and their social abilities too. Whatever we are doing, we have to plan with a range of organisations working together to ensure the best outcome for a child. That is really important. We need to listen to children and parents and be clear about what works. We offered online services during Covid as well but what we found was that people really wanted our staff to be there, professionally, socially distanced, 6 m away, waving to them from the road to say, "We are here for you". We delivered hot meals to those parents and their children and the children could not wait to get back into centres.

It annoys me, from a funding point of view, that the services provided by the community and voluntary sector do not get sufficient recognition by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in the thinking about what is needed. We are constantly having to spend a lot of effort in explaining what we deliver, why it is important and why it meets a need. That is very effortful and sometimes it takes away from the effort we could be putting into developing more and more programmes that work for children and families. I also feel it is important that we do not talk about just the problems but about the solutions. With the right services provided by organisations like Barnardos, the ISPCC and others, as well as the State and different professions, we can meet children's needs and give them hope and possibilities for their future, and a sense of purpose and meaning. That is important.