Ms Catherine Bond:

On the privatisation of services, there are five private fostering agencies in the country at the moment. Some of those are social enterprises so they are not all necessarily for profit. They provide wraparound services for the children. Looking at the costs like for like, there is not a huge difference and so that narrative needs to be changed. It is the case that, according to Tusla's numbers, there are just over 450 children in private foster care services, which are highly regulated and highly inspected by HIQA, contrary to the residential care services. They are providing in the gap for children in care. The rationale for their entrance into Ireland was the lack of foster care placements, and there continues to be a lack of foster care placements, so we need to take a balanced approach in this debate and this argument and get all the facts that are there. We are seeing higher numbers of young people going into residential care. This attests to the fact the numbers of children have gone down from 92% to 90% placed in foster care. We are hearing of very young children being placed in residential care, which is of grave concern. We need to tread carefully because we do not want to have children not going into foster care, whether it is through State services or private services. We want children to be in foster care as opposed to going into residential care, where we know the outcomes for many of them are not as constructive or positive.

I defer to my colleague Dr. Gogarty on the placement of children in foster care and the benefits.