UCD Professor of Clinical Psychology Alan Carr

The work done to date by Parents Plus for Irish society and child and family mental health and well-being is extraordinary. It has transformed the lives of thousands of families and done this on a shoestring budget. When the charity first began, Irish mental health and social care services were using North American or Australian parent training programmes that were not tailored to the needs of Irish families, were designed for delivery by trainers with professional backgrounds, and were very expensive, meaning many services could not afford them.  Parents Plus changed all this. This remarkable organisation created a suite of affordable interventions designed to meet the unique needs of Irish families, that could be delivered by both professionals and paraprofessional community leaders. They developed partnerships with universities and evaluated the effectiveness of their programmes in Irish communities.  Parents Plus programmes are evidence-based and  research-informed. They are  grounded in family-friendly, solution-focused, strengths-based practice. Because the costs of training trainers to deliver Parents Plus programmes is considerably lower than non-Irish alternatives, these parent training programmes are more widely available to a range of services supporting families.  In other countries such as the UK and the USA  with better developed funding systems for psychological research, Parents Plus, would attract significant funding for theoretical groundwork, randomised controlled trials, and replications of these trials by other research teams. The absence of these supports in Ireland makes the achievements of Parents Plus all the more remarkable.