Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank the Senator for the questions. It is very good that Ireland is showing global leadership in this area but I agree it is not from a position of strength within our own services. There is no doubt that we have a good distance to go to be up to par with the best in Europe, for instance, countries like Norway or Sweden. In fact, the sort of challenges that Ireland presents, and one of the reasons they are attractive to organisations like the WHO, is that the organisational structure that exists within Ireland, where we have a tradition of voluntary organisations and the semi-independent section 38s and 39s, mapped pretty well onto the situation in many very poor countries, and, organisationally, the way things are set up in Ireland is rather similar. As I said, we have well-intentioned services but they have not been put together in a coherent way.

Within the reconfiguration, as my colleagues mentioned, the focus of that was to have a more coherent approach to providing children's services. I know the committee is well aware that the shortfall is not so much in the funding but in the availability of staff, certainly speech and language therapists but also other staff, to provide those services. We cannot expect technology to take the place of professions so we do need those professions, but there are certainly ways in which technology can augment and add value to what professionals are doing.

That is one of the reasons I was trying to emphasise that it is not really a matter of tweaking what we have. There is a whole raft of European legislation and there are great opportunities for Ireland. This is a really good time to look at what we need to do structurally within Ireland, and also in terms of staffing and funding, but part of it is about orientating what we do to the challenges ahead in terms of new legislation but also the huge opportunities.