Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

Would the Minister of State agree that for the eleven and a half years of Fianna Fáil in Government we have had a Minister with responsibility for children? Would he agree it is outrageous and scandalous that four years after the formation of the HSE he, who is supposed to have an overview of our children's services, is as he put it hanging around to find out how it is operating and cannot tell the House definitively how many cases of children reported to be at risk are currently awaiting full assessment by the HSE? Does he agree he is incapable of monitoring what is happening in our child protection services?

Can the Minister of State explain what happened to the child protection notification system, which was supposed to have been put in place some years ago and in respect of which there were various IT difficulties? What was the cost of that system? What were the IT difficulties? What work has been done to get the system up and running. By what definite date will the Department have any guaranteed contemporaneous information available to it on the working of our child protection services?

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