Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 May 2022

Joint Committee On Children, Equality, Disability, Integration And Youth

Foster Care Issues and the Loss of Positive Care Services: Engagement with Tusla

Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I want to return to advocacy because it is so important. Advocacy, from our perspective, has to be supported for everyone in the relationship. For children in care we have three forms of advocacy. There is the child's social worker who is an advocate. People often forget that and think that the Tusla social worker is the big bad person but actually they advocate for the child. Many children increasingly have a guardian ad litem and their care is subject to supervision of the courts. We also fund a national NGO, Empowering People in Care, which increasingly provides advocacy to children in care. We would like to see more on that. That is on the child.

We fund direct supports to foster carers through the Irish Foster Care Association. Not everyone is a member of that. People come in and out of associations like any other club or so on. We are well over 90% in this case. Separate to the child social worker, foster carers have a direct link social worker. That is a social worker who specialises in fostering and foster parents. The third part of the advocacy is a group which sometimes gets forgotten in the debate or the narrative, namely the parents of the children in care themselves. There are small support systems in different parts of the country for parents of children in care but they are very sporadic. Over the last six months I commissioned the Children's Rights Alliance, independently of Tusla - although we will fund it - to commission a support service for parents of children in care which will grow nationally over the next three years. We have committed to investing very significant resources in that. By then, trying to take the combination of all that advocacy, you hope that ultimately you get the best outcome for the child and the carers.

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