Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for this interesting and informative discussion. It gives a balance in the context of previous discussions the committee has had about foster carers. It is interesting and important to hear the perspective of the parents of children in foster care and the challenges they face. I thank the witnesses for that and I thank other members of the committee for their contributions.

In my previous role as an addiction worker and key worker in Dublin, I had one of the toughest few weeks of my professional life at the time when, in the space of two weeks, three 18-year-old women arrived at our services. All three had left the care system, all three had children in care and all three had children removed from them while they were in care. All three also had some form of substance misuse issues. Of course, substance misuse could also have been the only coping mechanism available to them. That is a debate for another day. As one of the witnesses outlined, the State failed these women when it was acting in loco parentis. I was at a loss as to how to deal with them. I did not know where to turn, so I contacted EPIC. The support and advice I received from EPIC was invaluable to me and to those three women. I thank EPIC for that. If I found the experience traumatic, which I did, I can only imagine the trauma - it pales into insignificance - experienced by the three women who arrived at the service for which I was working at the time. It was horrendous. They were lost.

Reference was made to a particular initiative. I want to tease this out with all the witnesses. I refer to care-leaver parents and their children being cared for together. That is a really good initiative. The witnesses stated that they have seen examples of vulnerable care leavers and newborn being put in a foster-type placement together. This is a welcome initiative. If it had been in place when the three young women I mentioned arrived at the doorstep of the service I was working for, it could have helped them. Will the witnesses indicate how often this takes place? How is it working? Can this model be rolled out nationally? Any initiative that keeps a mother and child together has to be explored. We have a dark history of separating mothers from babies. Anything we can do to keep mothers and children together needs to be explored. I would like to hear the witnesses' input on that.