Mr. Gordon Jeyes:

Legal costs in 2014 were in excess of €36 million, mainly because of legacy debts. This year they will come in under €30 million. More than 50% of that is for the legal costs of guardians ad litemalthough they account for less than 50% of cases. We spend more on their counsel than I do for the whole agency, including our superior court work. We intend to strengthen Tusla’s legal services taking over our own quality assurance and oversight arrangements. We have proposed to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs that we increase the number of lawyers we employ that would give us contestability against the other firms to pilot more close working between social workers and the law in order to serve the courts’ and, more importantly, families’ best interests.

I am concerned about social worker training in the courts. More could be done at qualification stage. We have introduced new court reporting in the past two years. We had a court reporting group. We need to bring that back and review it to see whether we are addressing the areas of inconsistency that have been identified.

A point was raised about the over-representation of certain groups. We do wish to do some specific research. The over-representation of Travellers is a matter of considerable concern. We had already identified that. In Galway, the chances of a Traveller child being in care is ten times that of a child from the settled population. We need to go upstream to work with the Traveller community, on a multi-agency basis, to find the fundamental reasons for that. We cannot ignore it.

The report also mentions the new Irish. We have been working with the immigrant family support service to make sure there is a full understanding of standards in Ireland and the way in which we wish to work with them and not to do things to them.

The Senator also helpfully mentioned direct provision. The Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, report on that was a curate’s egg: it identified two of our areas that worked very well with it and two where there was significant room for improvement. We need to build on that. It is very difficult for the agency to promote effective child protection if the environment was designed, in the first instance, to make that difficult. The same applies to homelessness. We would include that work with the work on vulnerable groups, such as the new Irish and Travellers. We do have dedicated social workers and educational welfare workers in that area, and dealing with those who are homeless, to ensure they are advised and that we can minimise the impact of staying in hotel accommodation.

I represent the agency on the Government’s refugee task force making sure that the strengths of direct provision are kept and the areas that proved weak are left behind, not least in making sure that the emergency reception and orientation centres, EROCs, are child-friendly environments. While we are not being invited to comment on housing design, we think it is important to make sure child care is built in and that there are early years facilities, child-friendly environments and families housed on their own, not with single men and so forth.