Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

Okay. If one adds the increase of ten to the 60, that makes 70. However, with 71 to retire in February, that is a net decrease of one social worker. How on earth can the Minister claim this is meeting the recommendations of the Ryan report? More important, how can this possibly provide the required social work resources to meet the Children First guidelines which the Minister has committed to putting on a statutory footing? Peter McVerry has said that to bring us up to the number of social workers in Northern Ireland, which is by no means a beacon in this regard, we would need an extra 1,200 social workers. There seems to be no movement at all under the Minister's watch in terms of the net number of social workers available, although we need more.

Is there some massaging of the figures going on in terms of moving social workers from primary care teams and community preventative programmes into child protection? This seems utterly self-defeating and, ultimately, it will be more costly. Preventative social work should not lose out at the expense of social work further down the line. Clearly, prevention is even better than dealing with problems when they emerge.

There has been a failure to provide extra social work resources but we do not simply need more social workers. Once assessments are carried out we need a range of other resources which do not seem to be provided for in the budget in any way, including child care workers, family support workers, psychologists, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists. Where are the budget commitments to provide these resources? They will be necessary to put substance to the Children First guidelines and the Minister has stated she will put them on a statutory footing.

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