I recognise that we are in the middle of a global crisis and I have intervened on that issue twice in the past few days. However, there is also a real crisis nationally in the community and voluntary sector, which provides services for children and families. While I will refer to the situation in Sligo-Leitrim this morning, this is a nationwide issue.

The community and voluntary boards in Sligo-Leitrim provide and run services funded by Tusla but they are not in a position to pay their staff decent wages commensurate with their experience and qualifications. These boards are not in a position financially to pay increments to their staff, ensure that they have pension contributions or fund paid maternity and paternity leave. Many staff have no comprehensive sick pay arrangements. The boards provide supports and services for children, young people and families. They include home-based, targeted family supports to which clients are referred by the child and adolescent mental health service, CAMHS, disability services, local GPs and schools. The services provide supports to early school leavers, asylum seekers, refugees and Travellers and also provide parenting programmes.

The voluntary and community boards provide an extensive range of quality, professional caring services. The different services and their staff are held in high esteem because of the conscientious, caring and responsive nature of the services they provide. At one level, you might say money could not buy this service and that is, on another level, true. The services are run by voluntary boards, thereby saving the State huge sums of money. Critically, however, and this is why I refer to a crisis, many of the staff who provide these invaluable services are stuck on the bottom rung of pay structures. Many of them are ten or 15 years in the service but have received just one or, in some cases, no increments. There is no salary scale for staff and no financial credit for training and experience. Yes, there has been a core funding increase for family resource services, which is good. That core funding has gone to provide extra services and that is excellent. However, none of it is for family support workers, counsellors, youth workers, play therapists and the other staff who deliver the services. In Sligo-Leitrim alone, these services interact with several thousand families and children.

I know the Taoiseach will not disagree about the value of the services but, in order for them to provide a quality, nationwide service, including to the people of Sligo and Leitrim, they must be adequately funded. This requires not just a block grant but the ring fencing of a proportion of that money to ensure the staff who provide the service are paid a decent wage.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I share her admiration for all who work in the community and voluntary sector, particularly those working under the aegis of Tusla, which provides a range of services, as the Deputy said, right across the board, including family resource centres, home-based supports, supporting early school leavers and much more. The fundamental point is that in the Child and Family Agency Act 2013, under which Tusla was established, it is stipulated very clearly that the funding arrangement for such community and voluntary bodies does not give rise to an employment relationship between a service provider, its employees or agents on the one hand and the agency on the other.

In the last while there have been significant funding increases to the bodies that work with or are funded by Tusla. As the Deputy knows, Tusla is not the employer itself. There are about 121 family resource centres with a core annual budget of €18 million and that has been raised in the context of the national employers group and by trade unions such as SIPTU in numerous representations to the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Tusla provides funding to those bodies and to more than 600 community and voluntary sector bodies to deliver services on its behalf under sections 56 to 59 of the Child and Family Agency Act 2013. About €130 million in Tusla funding has gone to such bodies for a broad range of family supports. Increased sustainability funding of about 4% to those services as part of the Tusla budget comes to an extra €40 million in 2022’s budget for these bodies, which is a significant enough increase. It has been the way since the inception and establishment of Tusla to provide core budgets to these organisations. The annual allocations from Tusla for these budgets have been increased, particularly during the Covid period and in the 2022 budget a significant increase was allocated to Tusla for these community and voluntary bodies that are associated with its agreement for family supports.

The Taoiseach is right that there has been an increase in funding and services. I welcome that and I stated that but those services are delivered by staff; by the workers who man those services. The Taoiseach said himself that this has been the way since it started but I would put it to him that it is time to change or at least review that. The average salary in these organisations is €33,000 per annum, yet the average wage in Ireland in 2019, based on CSO information, is between €40,000 and €49,000. Most of these staff have level 9 qualifications or master’s degrees and they provide the services that are invaluable to families and young people. It is not good enough to stand back and say that Tusla has increased the funding. Part of that money should be written into the tender or the public procurement and set aside. Do not ask me how to do it as there are enough experts to figure that out but part of that money must go to ensure that the staff who provide those services have decent jobs and wages and want to remain in the service because staff retention is a huge issue which we need to act on.

I accept the Deputy’s genuine commitment to this sector and I have been engaged with many of the bodies over the years on the services they provide. Funding has been significantly increased and in the most recent budget, apart from the additional funding that was provided to Tusla by the Minister following the discussion on the Estimates, further funding of about €650,000 was provided from the dormant accounts programme to family resource centres in 2021. A further €1 million in dormant accounts funding also went to the family resource centres to progress minor maintenance works, the purchase of the central office and so on. The Deputy is talking about salaries and pay and conditions for those who work in the various bodies or for those who work providing services that would receive grants and core funding from Tusla. There are various mechanisms by which these issues are pursued such as the Workplace Relations Commission and so forth.