Ms Laura Dunleavy:

I will address the parental abandonment question first and then go on. The language alone - the term "abandonment" - is simply so damaging. No parent wakes up in the morning and decides to leave. There is always an underlying circumstance that has led to that. I spoke with a young kinship carer who was caring for her teenage siblings, and she received a letter asking her to prove with evidence that her father abandoned her. It is so wrong to receive that type of letter. The social welfare payment is there and the deciding officers, who we have spoken to, have a set of operational guidelines they have to satisfy. We need that payment completely changed. We would love to see a kinship-specific payment.

Ms Rice kindly made a booklet, which members all have, capturing the insights from 114 kinship carers in a Facebook group that she co-ordinates. One of them stated:

Please amend the rules for eligibility to the Guardian's [payment] Allowance to one rule:

That this child, or these children, need the full-time care of this person.

That would make lives a lot easier and ensure that kinship carers have the time they need to invest into supporting a child to heal through trauma in relation to supporting their adult child or in relation to navigating their own grief. At the moment, what we are seeing is that kinship carers are asked questions in relation to any sort of access and whether it is unsupervised or if there is any receipt of maintenance, and all those answers collate together to evidence whether there is or is not parental abandonment. I hope that answers some of what was asked.

Then, in relation to the data prevalence and trying to capture what we have said, the Department of children is working with Tusla on that and it hopes to have a statistic by the close of this year in relation to private family arrangements that are receiving a Tusla payment and private family arrangements that are not. That would help and would give us a good place to start. We have been trying to get some sort of data from the census, and the Department of children is working on that. It is an estimated 1% of population, so we are working from that overseas data.

Going back to the parental abandonment piece, when a parent is returning home from treatment, sometimes that parent is moving back into their mam's or dad's home. We have seen guardian's payments removed in that process because a parent might have applied for a social welfare payment after coming out of prison or returning home after a period in treatment and their parents want to support them to not have to access homeless services, and that means that the guardian's payment is stopped. There are lots of barriers and glass ceilings and hoops to jump through that rob kinship carers of their time, which is needed to sustain the role and that caring piece. Is there anything Mr. Peelo wants to add?