James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I could not agree more with the Deputy. The issues need to be dealt with before referral to social workers. That is the point of the Child and Family Agency and of all the non-governmental organisations, NGOs, the Department interacts with. On Monday we launched an excellent programme Tusla is introducing around far earlier intervention. We are moving away from crisis intervention and late intervention to early intervention and prevention. Many of the issues that arise can be prevented from ever escalating if parents get support from the Child and Family Agency and the other agencies that abound to help them prevent a situation escalating to the sort of problem that does require referral to social workers.

The Deputy asked me a specific question about the lower priority cases. I have the figures for Cork: in the 12 months prior to the inspection the service received 4,926 referrals.

Figures supplied to HIQA indicated that there were 4,071 open cases in the area. Of these 1,167 were unallocated and 2,904 were allocated a social worker.

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