Abstract:
Since the introduction of the Child Care Act some 20 years ago in Ireland, there has been
considerable expansion and development in child and family services. Despite this positive move,
some of the primary criticisms of service provision have been that there is an uncoordinated,
incoherent strategy for integrated working, resulting in a failure to deliver timely support to
families, a lack of clarity concerning roles, bureaucratic delay and inappropriate interagency
referral. The development and subsequent piloting of the Identification of Need (ION) model in
Sligo/Leitrim and Donegal has occurred against this backdrop. It was designed to respond to
many of these key inadequacies in existing service provision. Given this, the overarching aim of
this evaluation study was to assess the effectiveness of ION as a model of early intervention for
children and families and to capture the learning from the pilot phase.
