Mr. Bernard O'Regan:

I will comment on some of those questions and Professor MacLachlan on other parts. We are working with our HR colleagues at the moment to progress a dedicated recruitment campaign for children's services. That includes the points I was making earlier on the work with current panels, graduates and the international campaign and we have other measures that we are putting in place to incentivise staff to come and work in the children's services. It is a priority area for the HSE to focus on.

A difficulty we have, and it is almost the perfect storm, is that there has been significant investment in the HSE in recent years and many aspects of service have been going to the same pool to draw on a similar profile of staff. The system is not producing enough of the types of staff that we need. Professor MacLachlan will have some direct experience of this. We need to be producing more graduates in Ireland to meet our need. We need more speech and language therapists and so on. We need more programmes that allow people who have a primary degree in another area to do a short conversion programme that allows them to move into a therapy role and so on. There is a range of measures that the college systems need to develop to meet the needs of the State. Moreover, these are needs that are going to increase. The capacity review report of disability services has a projection of what is needed over a decade. If the level of funding identified in the capacity review report were to come over the next decade, we have an indication of the type of staffing that we need. We need the system to produce those staff.

I am in no doubt of the commitment among my colleagues in the HSE, including in HR, that recruitment into the children's network teams is absolutely a priority area and one that we are working to encourage people to go to work in. However, I say that while needing to acknowledge that we continue to compete with some other service areas that are also in urgent need of a similar profile of staff.

Will Professor MacLachlan comment on colleges?