Mr. Mark Smyth:

There are two barriers. One relates to counselling. There is some move from Government to try to support that. Our educational psychologists continue to be left out in terms of opportunities to do that. They must go through three years of a doctorate unfunded while paying €14,000 in fees. Irrespective of whether it is counselling, clinical psychologists or educational psychologists, we just do not have enough of them. Again, we are only training approximately 100 per year. Not everybody on those training programmes wants to work in our public service so we need to incentivise our psychologists to want to work in the public service by reducing those barriers and giving them opportunities. The reality is that there is a limited pool moving between different areas because there is an oversupply of jobs and an undersupply of psychologists. This will continue until we get more people training. If the Government allocated more funding next year to provide more places, it would be three years before those students came out as fully qualified psychologists. We have been highlighting this for a couple of years. We had a disability capacity review that indicated that we need 110% more people working in child disability services by 2033. There has still been no increase in attempts to recruit more people and create more places to fund that. We know where the gaps are and what the solutions are but we do not yet have the training places to meet that demand so we need better workforce planning. Our view is that this has not yet begun so we are on the clock.