Ms Saoirse Brady:

Not so far. Tusla has attended sessions we have organised. It is certainly interested. It is very overstretched at the moment as well. We had a session with some key decision-makers with a colleague from Wales who runs an organisation called Invisible Walls in one of the prisons there. It is doing amazing things like having parent-teacher meetings in prison. Ms Costello, Ms O’Shea and a number of others were in attendance. We saw a video of the impact it can have. He is a prison officer and has been kind of accepted by the establishment, too. He talked about how he went to the local principals’ conference in Wales and asked whether they had thought about children of people and what is done to accommodate them. He asked them whether they would like to get involved in his project, to which they replied that none of the children in their schools have parents in prison. He then put up a slide with all the school uniforms his organisation sees coming through the prison doors, and every single school was on it. There is this invisibility about those children which we really need to break down and address.