Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. What prompted me to ask this question is that, in the reply we got back, remembering that 870 children do not have a social worker, the Department was not able to give us a breakdown of the time that children were waiting. Someone could have gone onto the list two or three days before the question was asked, but it could have been months or a year. It would be useful to everybody if we could get that breakdown of data. I was going to ask about the interaction with the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science about college places because we know that we need to train many more. I welcome things like the apprenticeship group, but do we have timeframes for when that might become a reality? Is that likely to happen? Particularly in the area of social work, an apprenticeship route could be a really good model. I also wanted to ask about overseas, international workers. The issue of visas came up recently at a different meeting about the HSE. Nurses and so on were waiting for six to eight months for visas. It is just not doable. I will expand further in the next supplementary question.

See this speech in context