David Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire go dtí an Teach. I also welcome her to the post in which she serves. Along with Senator van Turnhout, I am a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children. I have been impressed with the Minister's performance in the engagements we have had at that committee. I am sure there will be positive changes in the area of early intervention and family support services.

I welcome the opportunity to have a debate on the issue today. It is important for us to get off the treadmill of debates and discussions on this issue and start putting in place actions and policies to deal with some of the problems in the system. I welcome two specific developments. First is the children's rights referendum and I look forward to the publication of the wording from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs so that we can analyse what it means. While it is important to enshrine rights for children in the Constitution, we need to go beyond that and vindicate those rights to ensure we have a framework of policies that are underpinned not just by intentions, but also by resources. I also welcome the Minister's commitment to begin work on the State's first early-years strategy, which will represent a significant amount of work for the Minister and her Department in coming years.

Two aspects of the strategy the Minister mentioned were improving educational outcomes, including progressing the objectives of the literacy; and examining approaches to providing targeted early childhood education programmes for disadvantaged children. We need to ensure that the strategy is cross-departmental because we saw what happened with the plan to take teaching posts away from DEIS schools. Resource hours and special needs assistants are being lost from schools. It is important to have a crosscutting, cross-departmental approach to this. I welcome that a strategy is being developed.

When speaking about child benefit, Senator Quinn mentioned the possibility of issuing food stamps. I do not believe there is widespread abuse of that system. Although a very small number of families may abuse the system, many parents use the supports they get for food, clothes, schoolbooks and many other things. I plead with the Minister not to go down that road and to maintain child benefit as a monetary payment. It is one of the few payments parents get directly for their children. I again thank the Minister for her presence today.