Mr. Francis Chance:

I will take that question. I remembered the Deputy’s previous career as he asked the questions. A key issue is that we are not starting from scratch here. There have been 20 years of good work going on in Ireland on prevention and early intervention. Some 20 years ago we started from scratch. However, in particular thanks to Chuck Feeney and Atlantic Philanthropies, there has been a significant investment into children and families services over the last 20 years, with a particular bent to moving these towards prevention and early intervention. That has been within the community and voluntary sector, as well as within the State sector.

In particular, the Deputy spoke about prevention, partnership and family support within Tusla. That programme was funded by Atlantic Philanthropies in order to establish it. A similar programme in which I was engaged with the Health Service Executive on the Nurture programme was about establishing and strengthening preventative services in the Health Service Executive. It developed into what is now the national healthy childhood programme. We are starting with good experience, knowledge, evidence and research within Ireland.

We have to note the departure of the Atlantic funding. Chuck Feeney’s model was giving while living. He has now basically spent down all of his money. Atlantic Philanthropies has now closed its doors. We do not have another Chuck Feeney on the horizon. Yet, we are a relatively wealthy country. Borrowing money at the moment is cheap, as the Ombudsman for Children’s Office has been telling us clearly in some of his recent contributions. The opportunity to invest in early childhood is strongly there, if we can find ways to do that and find what is best to invest in.

A well done piece of research a few years ago asked parents what they found important and helpful in raising their children. It asked them what the gaps were within that. One of the things that came from that was that parents do not understand what services sit under what Departments, silos, and agencies. They do not give a damn about that. If they have a support need, they want the support. The label attached to the person who gives the support is quite irrelevant. We, in our agencies and services in Departments and structures, are all concerned about that but it is important that the supports are there. Many of the families with whom we work - the more complex the family, the more likely this is to be true - require integrated solutions which require the input of more than one State agency, or more than one Department. The role of the community and voluntary sector within that can be crucial as well, because it can been seen as an honest broker or less stigmatising for parents to link with. There are those opportunities there to invest in local service provision.

I want to refer back to Deputy Dillon’s last question about the national lottery.

It is an example of what I am talking about in regard to how we fund services. We suggested eight criteria that should be used for national lottery funding in this area, including that the service must be focused on prevention and early intervention and that there would be a move to multi-annual funding of services or a three to five year period for funding of services. Funding a service for 12 months and it not knowing at a particular time of year if it will be operational on 1 January is not good for children and families. It is also not good for service development.

Services must be new developments and funding should not be used to replace existing statutory funding. We have seen evidence of funding being made available for something dressed up as a new service when it was just a recycling of an existing service. Development money needs to be used on new services, not existing services. There needs to be clear evidence of need for the service, including good local research on the service and why that particular model is appropriate. There must be evidence of the effectiveness of that particular intervention. Services are delivered in partnership with parents. We do not do things to parents; we do things with them. We consult parents and involve them in designing our services. Parents are the key and lead partners in the delivery of services to them. There needs to be strong evidence of integration with other services so that it is not about parachuting a service into a particular community, but about how that service will interact with continuous services in the area and will complement and work with those services in a joined-up way.

Pilot funding is important. There needs to be a commitment from the State agencies that if a pilot is shown to be successful, it will be prioritised for mainstream funding. There is no point in having pilots that run for 25 or 30 years. If a project is running for 25 or 30 years, either it is not working and it should be closed or it is working and it needs to be mainstreamed.