Ms Tanya Ward:

I will address the first part of that and then hand over to my colleague. One of the big things for children living in the direct provision system is the effect of institutionalisation on them and their parents. Children live through this. One of the best official insights is the HIQA report of 2015, which considered the social work services that were being provided to people in direct provision. What those whom compiled the report found was children who were hungry, who did not have enough clothes or who did not have access to toys or play facilities. These are very basic things that are part of childhood and that are needed for development. They found a lot of welfare issues. The big issue that was coming through as impacting on children was the mental health of the parents. Parents were living through years of a system where they were not cooking for themselves and were reliant on everyone else for everyday decisions without knowing what was going to happen in the future. When I went around to those centres, I asked people about the child protection issues and the parents would say, "I am the person my child is most at risk from. I am breaking down. I cannot take this any more." The Child Care Law Reporting Project shows that there is a very significant number of cases. They are over-represented in the numbers of children taken into care. Children have been taken from parents whose mental health has broken down because of the direct provision system.

The other effects of institutionalisation that we see relate to how children are being treated by centre owners and managers. In one centre, we might find children being treated very well and seeming to have a very good rapport with the people running the system. In another centre, we could find that the children are completely institutionalised and tell us lots of different accounts of things. In one instance, a child told me how they were in the kitchen in the catering facility and they saw the staff making smoothies in the kitchen. The kids got really exciting thinking they were for them; they had never had a smoothie before. The staff saw the kids and slammed the door. The kids realised the smoothies were not for them, they were actually for the staff. That was what was actually taking place. We hear lots of accounts like that because the staff themselves are institutionalised. They are subjecting the children to ill treatment and maladministration, essentially. That is what is happening.

The other thing we see a lot is poverty. Hunger was a massive thing. Particularly in one centre in Athlone, the food was really appalling. The children were in school until 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. The parents had been given a bag of deep-fried food, spring rolls, white rice and so on. It was inedible for the children by the time they came home from school. That was not the case with all centres either. It meant the children did not eat and because they were only on €9.60 a week, the parents did not have any kind of supplementary income to buy other food for the children. Obesity was also coming up because the kind of food that was being provided for children was so poor.

Children also talked to us about how ashamed they were to tell everyone they were living in direct provision. They would avoid play dates. If they were asked to go to a birthday party, they would say they were not available because they did not have the money to buy a birthday present. Parents talked about having to make these really difficult choices, such as, "I would love to send my kids to the local hurling club. I know it is only €2 or €3 but the problem is I need to buy a bottle of Calpol. How do I afford one over the other?" The increase in direct provision payments has been very important for those very basic things, so children can participate in everyday life.

The reality is that if we are going to mind children and give parents the best opportunity to be parents, they have to be cooking for their own families. They have to have their own front doors. The kind of things we were hearing included that a parent was not allowed leave a 14 year old in the main reception room. Children were not allowed to be left on their own. That is not good from a child development point of view. Children need to grow. They need to play on their own sometimes. They need to be away from their parents, particularly as they get older and they want to become more independent. It goes back to the need for own-door accommodation whereby children can have a normal childhood near communities and not in isolation, so they can mix in with Irish children and any other children and just have a normal childhood.

I want to return to the issue of unaccompanied minors that I mentioned earlier. When I was on the working group, we met a lot of children. "Aged-out minors" is the technical term. I met one young guy who was about 19 and who had arrived in Ireland at the age of 12. He had a Dublin accent. I met him in Galway and saw him as another Dub. He was really angry. He was in this particular hostel where it is all men. They eat together in the room while the security guard sits in a glass box. The conditions are very prison-like. What he was really angry about was that he had a family in Dublin and a life there. He said that no one told him an application for protection had not been submitted for him. He found out about it and then he got sent down there. He said he had been ripped out of his community and the family he had in Dublin. He asked why this happened, why no one told him in Tusla that this was going to happen to him. There is a very particular legal issue pertaining to why that is happening. I will pass over to my colleague, Ms Ahern, who has been coming across it through our legal advice service.