Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I concur with my colleague and I also welcome the Minister to the House. I appreciate the work that she and her officials have done in this regard. I completely agree with her. What she has outlined is not the intention of our Bill in any way. The intention is to bring parents under the compassionate arm of the State rather than having them end up in a courtroom. I appreciate the difficulty the Minister's drafters will have in differentiating between a child not enrolled in a school and one who is. The intention of the Bill is to ensure that Tusla and the agencies of the State can deal compassionately with all children within the primary school enrolment system, particularly four and five year olds, and that they can be interacted with, encouraged and empowered. Nobody wants to see the parents of any child in a courtroom situation. It is a failure on everybody's part if it comes to that.

We want to have that compassionate engagement and interaction from the agencies of the State for four and five year olds enrolled in school in order to correct poor patterns of behaviour at the earliest stage so that they do not compound and embed themselves into a much bigger problem later on. I appreciate the difficulty that the Minister's drafters will have. We will support her at every step along the way. Perhaps in time a more comprehensive Act may be needed to deal with this whole range of issues over a period of time. From the Labour Party's perspective, we are absolutely determined to work with the Minister on this.