There’s an accompanying laugh but given the amount of bad press the Child and Family Agency has received over the years, it’s easy to see how his tongue might not be entirely in his cheek.

Yet maybe Tusla is now seeing a way out of the metaphorical maze, with a long-awaited new ICT system to be fully rolled out this year and signs of progress elsewhere. McBride certainly hopes so.

“I am pretty optimistic,” he says. “2017, I’m sure you are aware, was a hell of a year. We had a lot of things come at us at the same time. In 30-odd years in this business, I have never known so many separate but simultaneous scrutiny processes going on.

“But I can actually say, hand on heart, I don’t believe it has blown us off course. I am quite surprised that it hasn’t because it has drawn quite a bit of time and resourcing capacity away from our day-to-day business, inevitably.”

Front and centre of all this was the fiasco surrounding the Tusla file relating to a false allegation of abuse against garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, when information from an unrelated case was placed under Garda McCabe’s name.

The controversy deepened into a who-knew-what farrago that enveloped former taoiseach Enda Kenny and Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone and also turned the focus onto how Tusla dealt with sensitive information.

McBride believes some of the problems that have dogged Tusla are legacy issues, while admitting that it has also made some mistakes, directly referencing the McCabe case — “while the original error didn’t come from us, we didn’t handle that information at all well enough and certainly not to the standards that we expect.”

The efforts to avoid a repeat includes the new National Child Care Information system, which is part of a number of measures, recently implemented and anticipated for the near future, within the CFA.

“The information follows the child,” McBride says of the NCCIS, adding that while the new system will be able to facilitate retrospective allegations of abuse, Tusla has “unashamedly prioritised” cases involving children now who may be at immediate risk.

Dealing with retrospective allegations is exceedingly difficult, he argues, with Tusla thrust into a situation where it has to engage in “forensic style interviewing” to effectively establish if an allegation is credible.

“That is not a role that social workers, traditionally at least, have been educated and trained in. That would have been a role for the guards, in other jurisdictions.”

The message seems clear — sometimes Tusla is expected to do too much in too many areas, at a time when its services are overstretched. It has had well-documented difficulties in hiring and retaining staff at a time when it has never been busier.

Its third quarter report last year showed that the number of referrals it received between April and June last year was the highest number for the period starting in January 2014.

The number of children listed as ‘active’ on the Child Protection Notification System was also as high in Q3 last year as it had been for a year, yet while many service indicators were up, significantly, the percentage of referrals that required an initial assessment was at its lowest level since the start of 2016. It prompts the question as to the how the implementation of mandatory reporting will affect this metric.

“We spend a hell of a lot of time and resources and capacity filtering things out,” McBride says.

“A significant proportion of all referrals into us do not reach the stage of requiring an initial assessment.”

They all receive an initial screening, but as he outlines, a smaller percentage again of those do receive an assessment then require ongoing work. Given that last year it was reported he had misgivings about mandatory reporting and how it might impact on Tusla’s workload, it is possible the gap already in existence between initial referrals and full-on cases would widen further.

Tusla made a business case based around a forecasted ‘moderate’ increase as a result of mandatory reporting, and its chief executive believes this was “a reasonable thing to do” in light of one view that, with Children First guidelines well established, many people may have been acting as though mandatory reporting was already in place in reporting any concerns to the authorities.

“I can buy that up to a point but once you give someone a statutory responsibility to refer, I think they will if they are in any doubt,” he says, adding that if it was found that mandatory reporting did exacerbate the issues around balancing referrals and services, the government would be getting a call about the need or more resources. “We would have to go back and say we do need more resources,” he admits.

“The problem is what kind of resources would we need. You can’t knit social workers and there are only 250 of them graduate a year. We are looking at creative solutions, we have been promoting third level institutions to try and promote Tusla as an employer of choice, we have been going abroad in terms of trying to get Irish people back from abroad, we have been going to the North, we have been going to the UK to try and get in touch with people, so we are doing all sorts of creative things. But I don’t think we should put all our eggs in the social work basket, there just possibly won’t be enough of them.”

Other professions, such as social care professionals, may have to answer the call, particularly in addressing more low-level tasks. He freely admits that he, like his predecessor, Gordon Jeyes, would have preferred, in an ideal world, more services under Tusla’s control.

Well, we have the combination of services that we have,” he says with a slight laugh, “whether it’s the right combination, whether it’s the most coherent combination of services, I think is open to debate.

“The whole Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services I think is a significant gap. We have a statutory duty to provide services to look at the psychological welfare of children, that’s what the Act says and yet we don’t have a psychological service here, we have to essentially purchase that from the HSE. We have some work to try and move that on.

“There’s bits of service that are not with us and frankly, if I was designing it from a blank sheet of paper now I would have CAMHS in, I would have disability [services] in. I would have youth justice in, and I would hopefully get some public health nurses in, for example, and psychologists and other therapists as well, in order to create a much more coherent and — sorry for the jargon — but holistic service for these kids.

“As things stand at the moment we are having to negotiate through things like joint protocols services for, agreement with the HSE around disability, mental health, agreements with Youth Justice around kids who have one foot in our care system and another foot in our youth justice system.

“Because they’re not under one management structure we’re having to negotiate all these relationships all over the place. That’s not ideal in my view.”

As for the responsibilities Tusla does have, he says there has been a “flattening out” of the number of children in care, although he believes the homeless crisis is a factor in the aforementioned rise in referrals.

He also queries the high number of teenagers entering the care system at a relatively late age, something that did not happen in Scotland, where he previously worked.

It has led to Tusla looking to increase its community-based supports, as happened in his old bailiwick.

“We are trying to develop this now here. They would be seen every day if that was necessary, they would be seen at evening, they would be seen at weekends, things wouldn’t shut down for six or seven weeks during the school holidays for example, they would be taken off on very focused activity programmes, issues would be addressed, if they are having difficulties at school teachers would be working with them off-site. It is really, really intensive and it really does require that level of intensity because some of these kids are quite difficult.”

He thinks it is “a reasonable hypothesis” when he’s asked if curtailing of services during the economic crash might have played a role in these later-stage cases.

Last year, Tusla adopted a new national practice approach to child protection and welfare, incorporating the internationally-used Signs of Safety model, with clear thresholds for child protection intervention.

It chimes with McBride’s own views expressed over the past year, and he repeats that it is “completely unrealistic” to give guarantees that children do not face risks. He says he wants to prioritise frontline services within a more sophisticated corporate infrastructure, but when it comes to intervening in a family, it is a matter of proportionality. “You cannot eliminate risk,” he says.

“We do not live in a risk-free world. We are trying to take a view that there is a level of risk that can be managed.”

Macro conditions — homelessness, the economy, domestic violence, addiction and so on — need to also improve and a gauge of ultimate success would be fewer children ending up in care because they wouldn’t need that level of assistance. As he points out, the majority of children in care are doing fine, thanks to the “extraordinary” efforts of foster carers. A planned expansion of out-of-hours services will include on-call support for those carers that he believes are underpinning the childcare system in this country.

Given the shocking stories that have emerged in recent decades involving children and how they were hurt and neglected, it is a balancing act. He doesn’t want to over-intervene, or under-intervene, nor does he want people to judge everything through “the hindsight lens”.

Tusla as an organisation is still in its infancy and there’s a sense it has been running to catch up. “I think the first two years were just, you know, we were really just trying to survive, we really were,” he says.

“It has to be said we were set up with something of a shoestring, you wouldn’t have done it like that if you’d had a choice.

“But I think over the last couple of years, I am really optimistic, there’s further investment, so well done to the government for investing in that last couple of years. We are trying to put that to best effect.”

As a 15-year-old, McBride was on the books at Aston Villa. All these years later, and in an entirely different but equally pressurised business, he’s in the dug-out - and as everybody knows, it’s all about results.