Ms Kate Duggan:

Tusla does not have a recruitment embargo. We have always, even prior to the establishment of Barnahus, funded CARI. It provides therapeutic and counselling services for children who have been sexually abused or for their family. The feedback on that model is really good and very much valued. Tusla employs its own therapeutic staff to provide supports and that is supplemented by CARI.

Certainly, one of the issues or challenges that we have to respond to in the coming years is the Barnahus model and the joint interviewing and all of that. While great progress is being made, I refer to the ongoing therapeutic needs of children and families and looking at a kind of hub-and-spoke model in which the therapeutic interventions, post-assessment or post-prosecution, can continue to be provided to those children and young people closer to home so they do not have to travel back to a Barnahus centre. For us, that is nothing to do with the embargo. Tusla does not have a recruitment embargo. It is to do with the fact that there has been an expertise built up in CARI. We are very much working in partnership with it to extend therapeutic services, particularly in the west. We do not want people from Donegal having to travel back down to Galway for their therapeutic intervention when they have completed their training.