Ms Catherine Bond:

I would like to clarify the concept of the care team for the child. It is not the social work team, but everybody involved in the child's life, whether it is the school, the local services for the child, the GAA club, or the child's family. As Dr. O'Brien said earlier, a village raises a child. Everybody works in the best interests of the child.

I go back to Deputy Cairns' point about IFCA's budget submission. It looked at the value attributed to foster care and the savings foster care provides on behalf of the State. In IFCA's budget submission, we seek a €100 increase in the foster care allowance. We are also looking at other peripheral issues such as the back-to-school allowance that should be extended to children in care and issues such as mileage for foster carers, because we have foster carers who drive children many miles throughout the country for visits, including therapeutic visits and visits with their siblings. We need to try to support this system of foster care. That is what I was saying earlier. We are at a juncture where great pressure is coming onto the system at every level, as everybody has attested today, with the children in care, social workers, the high level of burnout, and the fact we cannot retain social workers who are recruited.

We are at a great crossroads here. It is fantastic the committee is discussing the issue; hence the recommendation by IFCA. We called it an advisory group. The Irish Association of Social Workers called it a working group. It is time to stop and pause and to see what has really gone well in this system. We do have 90% of children placed in foster care, growing up in family life. We must remember this is about family life, children going to school every day, meeting their friends, going to the GAA and being in and growing up in communities rather than in alternative arrangements. We need to celebrate and harness that, but we also need to pause and look at what else needs to happen. How do we retain the good things we have? How do we address the many challenges that are presented? All of us working together need to address these. That includes increasing family supports for parents so that children do not come into care and providing those supports to children, because, ultimately, nobody wants children to come into care at the end of the day. Families are the most important place for children.

Our chairperson, Mr. Raymond Nolan, is a foster carer who is at the coalface every day and night. He tells me about how his young lad in care does not sleep and he is up at 2 o'clock every morning sending me emails. I ask him to speak.