Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The overall policy of the Office of the Minister for Health and Children, in line with the HSE, is to try to move towards early intervention and prevention. If there were 50 or 60 social workers employed, as would be required under the proposal made regarding an out of hours service, I would love to put them into the families most at risk and try to avoid a situation that leads to children coming into care. There is not enough throughput to justify employing 50 or 60 social workers who would receive very irregular phone calls about children at risk.

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