Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To preface my remarks, I absolutely accept that Tusla's job is very difficult. It is worth saying that Ireland has a very unhappy history in respect of child protection. Generationally, we have failed children and there is no doubt that Tusla came into a very difficult situation. At the time that Tusla was being established and the legislation to do so was passing through Dáil Éireann, our position was that we favoured the idea but we were concerned that if the resources were not going to be provided and the social workers and recruitment were not going to be up to scratch, it would not be able to succeed in achieving what it was intended to achieve. To a considerable extent that has unfortunately been borne out.

I accept the point that people need to be judged against reasonable standards and not with the benefit of hindsight and that individual cases are useful in terms of getting a sense of the kind of considerations that might be involved. What concerns me most in the reports from HIQA, the Shannon report, a number of other reports and the information we have received through parliamentary questions, are the structural weaknesses that exist. This is not something that can be contextualised by missing information. It is almost an objective fact that there are structural weaknesses.

Tusla was initially invited before the committee in the context of foster care, although wider issues have since emerged. In the last fortnight a report into south Dublin and Wicklow stated that 84%, or 188 of 223, foster care households in that area had not been subjected to a performance review in the past three years, despite child protection concerns being reported in a number of those settings. Some of those foster parents were not even familiar with what that process involved. It is structural issues like that which create significant concerns for people like us and weaken our faith in Tusla to deliver.

I accept that there are recruitment issues, but it is also an issue that there are still - according to the last statistics I have seen - more than 1,000 high-priority, unallocated cases. There are always individual cases and considerations to be considered, but even in the opening statement returning a child home was mentioned as a positive outcome. In a number of these cases, including one particular case featured in the "RTE Investigates" show, somebody was returned to a person against whom allegations of abuse had been made. Perhaps the witnesses can enlighten me, but I cannot think of a single mitigating circumstance in which that could be acceptable. It seems there are structural issues, issues with recruitment and perhaps there are management issues, but some of it also seems to be cultural. I publicly welcomed the new child protection strategy and I believe there is a lot of good in it, but there are still significant cultural issues as far as I can see. Certainly, I have received a lot of feedback to that effect.

On recruitment and retention, I do not need a comment back on this, but I want to briefly relay suggestions that social workers have made to me. They have suggested that there not be the same difficulty in recruiting administrative staff and that doing do should assist in freeing up social workers. It appears that recruitment has now surpassed the issues with retention. Does that specifically refer to the child protection social worker category? Are there more child protection social workers being recruited than are being lost? People also felt that central recruitment was not working and that local recruitment was more effective. There was also a sense that the applied social work practitioner grade, which has essentially lapsed, is something that should be considered.

I express my continued concern at the issue of outsourcing. The level of reliance on the Five Rivers agency is still very considerable. It is even mentioned in the statistics the witnesses provided today. I am particularly concerned that cases under section 12 will inevitably become a very serious category of incident. Five Rivers apparently reserves the right to refuse children with difficult behavioural issues. That potentially means people will end up in Garda stations when that is not necessarily the right place for them to be. I express my continued concern about the reliance on outsourcing.

The issue of inter-agency co-operation has been touched on and perhaps there is improvement on the way. The Shannon report continued into 2016 in respect of the focus groups. At that stage there were a number of comments. The audit into section 12 found that there were "low levels of meaningful communications between agencies", that co-operation and co-ordination were largely dependent on good personal relationships, that a critical theme of notification not being communication was emerging and that there was a lack of feedback to Garda members. As far as I understand those focus groups continued right up to 2016. I would still be concerned about that particular issue.

The out-of-hours service was also touched on in that report. There is progress in certain areas but it is stated in the report that there continues to be no comprehensive social work service that is directly accessible to children and family outside of office hours. That is also a concern.

My last questions are relevant in the context of what the witnesses have said happened after the Baby P case in Britain, when an overall review of social services found that there has perhaps been an overreaction and things had became very process-oriented. Geoffrey Shannon's report, which has been valuable, focused on a very discrete area of child protection issues in terms of section 12.

Does Mr. McBride believe there is a value in a similar audit being taken of the full remit of Tusla's responsibility and child protection structures in order that we can get a full picture of where the structural and perhaps cultural deficiencies are?

Mr. McBride said of the Shannon report: "In respect of the Shannon Report I can confirm that this was commissioned by An Garda Síochána for An Garda Síochána and no member of staff was interviewed as part of the methodology for conducting the review or writing the report." In the context of the publication of that report a press release was issued then withdrawn with the intention of dispelling any doubt about whether Tusla was trying to undermine the report or making adverse comment on it. I would be slightly concerned that this comment is a restatement of that first press release. It seems to be very carefully worded when it reads "no member of staff was interviewed as part of the methodology for conducting the review or writing the report". Was the rapporteur, Geoffrey Shannon, in contact with Tusla seeking data and information while compiling that report and was there ongoing communication between the rapporteur and Tusla?