Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 October 2025

Committee on Drugs Use

Kinship Care and Care: Discussion

2:00 am

Ms Laura Dunleavy:

I will follow on from that. As we are a small programme, we rely a lot upon the partnership. We have established a number of pilot peer groups within family resource centres, FRCs. It has an impact when we get information to someone at the right time in terms of access to community-based supports, early education, financial support and meeting other people who are navigating the same journey, as well as people seeing themselves reflected in the person who is sitting across from them. There is huge worth in that. We have relied a lot upon the partnership with FRCs to get some of that over the line. We would like to see that in every other community-based programme.