Mr. Bernard Cantillon:

I will focus on the difficulties with placements and how they impact on the work of individual social workers. In the Dublin region there is a particular difficulty in sourcing foster care placements for children, which has led to placements being sourced through private agencies down the country. Social workers are finding placements for children from the Dublin region in Wexford, Kilkenny, Munster and even Donegal. Responsibility for each case remains with the social worker in Dublin, despite the child being placed in Donegal or Wexford, etc.. The social worker has to visit the young person involved while their caseload remains the same as if the child had been placed in Dublin. Social workers from Dublin are travelling across the country to meet the children for whom they are responsible but this is not reflected in a reduction in their caseload, even though these visits may wipe out an entire day or even more than that. This places particular difficulties on social workers in Dublin and many colleagues have told me they cannot do it any more. Their work day begins early in the morning when they have to travel to meet young people in Donegal, Cavan or Westmeath; I had to go to Wexford and across the midlands under the caseload I had to manage. One ends up spending half a day for a short meeting with a young person's school and yet one has all the other cases to deal with as well, which makes it particularly difficult for social workers.

The children-in-care teams manage caseloads of children who are in foster care but there are difficulties in the recruitment of social workers, and there are not enough of them. When a child protection concern comes in and a child is identified as needing to go into care, the duty or child protection team is meant to take responsibility almost instantaneously but there are no social workers to do that so the children have to remain in the caseload of the social workers at the duty end of the house. Those workers carry huge responsibility for assessing the cases coming in and carrying those cases when they should be on another team. Significant stress and pressure are being put on individual social workers to manage this as a result of the difficulty in recruiting social workers.

Other areas of social work also have high case loads but those in child protection are unmanageable because of the lack of staff. In May and June every year, the local social work departments speak with the new university graduates and everybody who wants to come into Tusla is recruited at that point. By September or October, this pool of people has dried up and another cohort of experienced social workers have left, while those who started in May or June begin to leave. By Christmas there is usually nobody available to fill vacancies and we have to wait until the following June or July to fill them from the new round of graduates. The cycle is exhausting for social workers because they have to carry the burden of all the additional cases, which are unallocated at that stage.