Dr. Maria O'Dwyer:

Thank you very much Chair. We very much welcome the opportunity to engage with members today about how we can invest now to ensure bright lives for children living in Ireland today, tomorrow and every day. The Prevention & Early Intervention Network, PEIN, represents organisations and individuals working in children, family and community services throughout Ireland who are committed to developing a prevention and early intervention-led approach to service planning and delivery. PEIN focuses on the most effective ways of building a protective layer of support to stop difficulties from arising in the first place and providing support at the earliest possible stage when these difficulties occur.

International and Irish research, Government policy and the experience of practitioners on the ground all clearly indicate the social and economic benefits of prioritising prevention and early intervention. However, too often our supports to children and families are too little, too late.

We would like to use today’s opportunity to talk about the impact of the pandemic on children and families, the impact of child poverty and adversity, the national policy environment for prevention and early intervention, the immediate priorities to shift front-line service delivery towards prevention, and the funding strategies needed to achieve this.

There is positive learning from the pandemic in terms of the widespread embracing of public health messages, our combined capacity to make quick changes to how we delivery our services, the adoption of virtual ways of working and the consensus that nobody should be left behind. However, PEIN members tell us that those children who were most disadvantaged before the pandemic have suffered most because of it.

Our members' services are experiencing increased demand, based on pre-existing, new and emerging needs. Anxiety, in particular, is having a debilitating impact on many children and many parents. Adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, including the impact of poverty itself, result in serious physical and mental health issues across the life course.

Both prevention and early intervention are well referenced in a range of Government policy papers, including Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures, First 5and Sláintecare. However, these policies have yet to be fully implemented and there is a risk that preventive measures could become sidelined, as we continue to deal with onerous national crises such as the pandemic and homelessness.

Children should not wait to access services which are critical to their development. There is a pressing need to ensure that the HSE services that screen children’s development are immediately and fully resumed and that those babies born just before or during the pandemic are fully screened as soon as possible.

We also need to urgently reduce our waiting lists for the full range of early intervention services. In failing to do this, many children may require intensive, long-term and costly interventions later on. These are wholly avoidable.

Clearly, we cannot stop interventions to children with critical needs in order to invest in prevention and early intervention. Instead, we need to reach a point of equilibrium, that delicate balance between crisis response and prevention. We need to front-load and ring-fence funding to preventative services in order to achieve savings on crisis services in future years. For example, PEIN proposes a strategic use of national lottery funding in order to front-load investment in preventative services.

We very much look forward to engaging with members this afternoon on the pivotal role that prevention and early intervention can play in shaping the child of three into the adult of 33. I thank the committee.