Mr. John Scanlon:

On the area of early intervention and trying to address cause where possible, we have a programme in St. Ultan's called integrated care and education, ICE. It is a specific programme that provides supports and wraps around the child. Going through the list of 70 or 80 kids in the past 12 months, they have needed emotional support due to bereavement, separation, violence in the home or whatever. They are aged three, four, five and six. We can actually support them if we are given the resources to do so. They already trust us, they are in and out of the building. It is a model that can be replicated. It is important for people to take note of that. It could do with additional resources. We provide play therapy and a lot of other resources but we have to fund those ourselves through philanthropic and various other ways. We put the child at the centre of everything we do and we really do believe in early intervention. Schools can be the source and the place for that because the child is going to school anyway. They know the child best and are seeing the child every day. It is a perfect place for this to happen, once the relationship exists between the school and the support services that go with it. We have had 14 or 16 years of it in St. Ultan's so we have had time to build it. It takes time.

Dealing with the other side of it, how to address a lot of these issues on a bigger scale, it may even seem too big. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth has been really good to St. Ultan's. We have a really good working relationship with them. The Department of Education does not really engage with the campus as a whole, it just specifically deals with the school. We are all working for the children. We had an assessment a couple of weeks ago where the Department of Education early years team came out to see the early years section. They are seeing that smooth transition, the care for the kids and so on and they are asking why this cannot exist in other schools. We know ourselves from past whole-school evaluations that there is no box for that in the Department of Education report so it will probably never appear anywhere in there. It is about Government working together. We are working together.

As a very specific example, Cherry Orchard is getting all of the wrong publicity but Deputy Costello has been through it and he knows that there are 7,000 people living with one corner shop. That is what it is. It is an example of really bad planning, no support services and those that are there are just not enough. Now we are putting more housing in on top and no additional services. What is going to happen in five or ten years time? The majority of these will be social housing. It is about having a whole-of-government approach. I know it is meant to come through the implementation board. Hopefully it does. It may seem too big an issue for this meeting because it is just about children but it is about every Department working together.