Mr. Francis Chance:

To pick up on Deputy Whitmore's question on policy input, the prevention and early intervention network is made up of individuals and agencies who work at the front line with children and families in providing supports. That is universal supports to all children and families, and targeted supports to children in families with high levels of need. It is that whole continuum. It is important to say that prevention and early intervention is not something that just happens in the State sector or something that happens in the community sector, but it is something that needs to happen in both the voluntary and community sector and the State sector in a joined-up way.

We have had many opportunities to input to policy. We have had inputs to Sláintecare, to First 5 and we are seeking to input into the new children's strategy and we are inputting to the review of the national lottery. A key element of how we do our business is to represent the views of our members. We are launching a paper later on this week on direct provision, looking at how the community and voluntary sector and the State sector can work alongside the Minister and the Department to end direct provision and support the integration of children and families currently in direct provision into local communities. We have a unique offering to bring to that particular table. We are very much engaged in every opportunity and particularly we have been working intensely with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth on the development of a national model for parenting supports. This was a very intense piece of work over the past 12 months. We look forward to the Minister launching that hopefully in the very near future and seeing it turn into action.

In regard to costing our proposals I take the point that €21 million is a small amount and our vision by no means stops at that. That is a starting point. The suggestion we were making was that over time we should grow the percentage of lottery funding that is spent on children and families in accordance with the percentage of our population who are under the age of 18. That would over time move that €21 million up to a rolling investment fund of €60 million. That is significant. In terms of costing out the proposals, one of the things we feel is very important is that this needs to be done locally, in local communities and around local need. There needs to be national guidance and national structures which identify what we need in terms of prevention and early intervention, what it looks like and what services should be available to every child and every family no matter where they live in Ireland. Then each local community should work together under the auspices of their children's services committee, State providers and community and voluntary providers with children and families, talking about how that would look in their particular community. The supports that might be needed on an Aran island would be very different from the supports provided in north inner-city Dublin. The key thing is that each child and each family gets the equivalent range of supports no matter where they live.

There is a piece of work to do on costing but we see that as part of the process to identify what our goals are and then cost that, but to have some initial funding ready to invest in it at the earliest possible time.