Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations, which all basically say the same thing. I am struck by Mr. Petrie's presentation because he summed matters up when he stated:

Schools cannot keep carrying this. We do not have the professional expertise. We are juggling with students' health and we are terrified of dropping a ball. We do not have the time. As long as we continue to act in place of proper services, students will continue to fall between the cracks and schools will continue to have to choose whether we support a child in mental health crisis at the cost of the child with a specific learning difficulty.

We are pitting children against one other for resources, which is shameful and has to be stopped. The idea of us having these hearings and compiling this report is that these issues need to fixed once and for all. We have been talking for years about what needs to be done.

My first question relates to the lack of joined-up thinking. There are NEPS, CAMHS, social workers, the HSE, the Garda and student support teams, all of which work in silos, not in a co-ordinated way, which is what needs to happen. Who is going to make all these services work together and work with the student support teams? Why is it not happening?