Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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The witnesses are very welcome and I thank Ms Duggan for her opening address. I worked in a Tusla-commissioned service for many years and many of my closest friends work for Tusla or in a commissioned service. That is why I must talk about section 56 workers. We talk about restructuring. I worked in the Sligo-Leitrim home youth liaison service for 17 years. Many of us did. We called it the Hotel California at one stage because we could never check out. We all loved our jobs so much but the pay was so bad. We did not get a pay rise after 2008. I am a big advocate for trade unions and through them, I know that there will be 5% and 8% increases in wages. The amount of trust we had built up with families locally and the amount of knowledge we had, as professional social care workers, was gone because we could not stay there any more. Our wages were not even in line with inflation.

I am a huge advocate of the Meitheal model. It made my job of co-ordinating services much easier. A lot of my daily job was making child protection referrals and Meitheal was the nice face of Tusla. I wonder about the restructuring. The prevention, partnership, and family support, PPFS, programme was a great model. I am wondering why it is going to change. That was the soft side of Tusla. For someone like me who worked on the front line, that was an easy win. Meitheal was an easy sell.

The child and family support networks, CFSNs, and children and young people's services committees, CYPSCs, are wonderful. I think those structures are fantastic. All the time, you are relying on people who are delivering the work on the ground. If anything comes out of this conversation, can increments be included in the budget allocated for commissioned services? Can that be a part of the package people are delivering? I used to often be chairperson of a Meitheal process. I was a lead practitioner when there was an identification of need, ION, approach. As the lead practitioner, I would be holding a table attended by people who might be earning triple my salary. I would be the lead practitioner bringing the families in.

It is frustrating when we consider the work that the front-line services are doing. We sometimes used to say that people had taken the soup by working directly with Tusla because they would get incremental scales and pensions, unlike the people on the front line. Many of my colleagues and closest friends have done that. The alternative is not sustainable. People will not stay in the sector. Not only are we losing the trust that has been built up with families but we are losing the professional knowledge that has been there for so long. The people who work in the area of social care do so because they love their jobs and care about the families. We would promote Tusla. That is what we would have been doing. We would have been very comfortable making child protection referrals because we had built up trust in communities. Is there anything we can do to ensure that pay is in line with direct employees and that pensions and annual increments are available, even if they are just in line with inflation? People on the ground and in front-line services, such as home liaison services, family resource centres, FRCs, and Springboard projects, are holding it together. Without them, there would not be referrals. When there is an allocation of funding to individual services, there should be no pitting local services against one another for the allocation of money or commissioned services. Section 56 workers need the respect and recognition they deserve. They need the monetary reward to do the job.