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

There has been quite a reduction in the number of administrators right across the HSE in what was the predecessor of the Child and Family Agency. It is a considerable reduction because that issue was exercising many people on that side of the House before this Government took office.

The Deputy asked about numbers. Of the cases awaiting social workers, 234 were assessed as high priority, 790 medium priority and 143 low priority status. The area had 93 children on the child protection notification system at the time of the inspection, all of whom had an allocated social worker.

To revert to the Deputy's earlier point, we certainly want to get into the area of prevention and early intervention. We also want to ensure that social workers are doing the work that they alone can do, and that their time is not being taken up by using outmoded IT or having no IT, and filing reports that clerical staff could be doing. When we talk about administrators, let us always bear in mind that we get much better bang for our buck if we have clerical staff supporting the professionals, especially social workers.

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