Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I reiterate that I have enormous sympathy for parents who have to go through this process because it is unnecessarily prolonged and drawn out. It can be tortuous and really tough on parents because much of the time they have had painful and difficult problems relating to having children. I would love, as a Minister of State, to be able to make this reform and shorten that period of assessment. I have great ambition to do so.

I will identify some of the problems we have come across in dealing with the issue. Under the current system the same social workers are providing the adoption assessments as are providing services to children at risk and child abuse or neglect cases. We are drawing from the same pool. Members will know from previous debates in this House and media coverage that those same social workers are under serious pressure in terms of waiting lists. All children are assessed initially but the provision of services is taking some time. Every Minister with responsibility for children faces the nightmare scenario such as that which happened in the case of the child, known as baby P, in the Harringate Council in the UK. Child protection and welfare services are delivered by the same cohort of social workers who are under severe pressure to provide them. That is where some of the difficulty arises. We cannot ignore in any debate in this House the serious resource issue the HSE is experiencing in 2009, experienced in 2008 and is likely to experience in 2010. We cannot ignore those facts but, in fairness, we are dealing with legislation and the setting of standards.

On Senator Bradford's point about the setting of a timeframe, I would be reluctant to do that because I do not want to promise something I cannot deliver. This raises the question Senator Mary White and others raised, namely, a not-for-profit arrangement and why that cannot be done. I am not sure it cannot be done. That is why I am discussing with the IAA other ways of doing that. Some problems that have been highlighted in those discussions reveal that if a not-for-profit group is set up to carry out such assessments, naturally it will promise it will carry them out more quickly than the existing service and it will have to be self-funding. It will require a payment to be made whereas no such payment is made in the assessment process carried out by the HSE. The danger is whether such an arrangement would create a two-tier system where people with means would be able to get an assessment done more quickly. Trying to equalise and avoid that kind of problem is what we are scoping out with the IAA.

I reiterate that, as provided in section 37, the accredited bodies can carry out assessments. That is set out in section 37(3)(b), the next section with which we will deal. There is no legislative barrier to this being done and the political will exists to do it as far as I am concerned. I take on board the encouragement of Senators in this regard.