Mr. Francis Chance:

To pick up on one issue around the whole area of assessment of need and disability, we had a real problem in recent years about demarcation between State agencies. Going back to my earlier comments, many children and families need the support of more than one agency and it should not be a buck-passing exercise. It should be a partnership exercise. In some of the more extreme cases within Tusla and the HSE there is now a working protocol for how that is planned, but that needs to be applied in the area of prevention and early intervention as well. Both agencies have something to bring to that table and something to offer in that space. It is important they operate both at a national level and a local level co-operatively to develop services and ensure there are proper and effective pathways for families to get to services as quickly as possible. That happens very well in some parts of the country but in other parts of the country, it does not happen at all. One of the phrases we have used in our discussion is the moving family test, which refers to a family who may have their first child while living in one part of the country and for some reason move before having their second child and move again before having their third child; they live in three different parts of the country. We are not suggesting they should receive exactly the same service wherever they are but they should receive an equivalent service. We might structure the service differently in rural west Donegal compared to how it might be structured where my colleague Dr. O'Dwyer is, in Limerick. It is around what services are there already and what is the most logical way to deliver that service in a particular community; nobody should be disadvantaged in accessing a service because of where he or she lives. There has been an assumption in recent years that child disadvantage is something that happens in urban areas, particularly in inner city areas and areas of high deprivation but it happens in all parts of the country.

When the area-based childhood programme was set up, 13 projects were established and 12 out of those 13 projects were based predominantly in cities and large town areas. There is evidence on poverty and child deprivation that there are particular problems in the far west of Ireland and around the Border region. Investing in services in those areas is also important. The original area-based childhood development programme was meant to be phase 1 of a continued roll-out of that programme. We are still waiting for phase 2 to happen, so the notion of investing in another tranche of services in communities in an integrated way looking at the next range of need will be important.