Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise to the witnesses. Every Tuesday, I need to perform an act of bilocation between this committee and the Joint Committee on Justice. I find myself either missing one meeting or running between the two.

Social workers are suffering needless burnout. This is partly because there are not enough of them and the pressures on the system make the job harder. This contributes to quicker burnout. One of the things that can contribute to burnout but can also be a positive and a preventative to burnout, is the purpose of the job. Social work is in many ways a vocation and can be a very rewarding and meaningful career. However, there are many times when a person is butting heads with poor structures and poor resources and it becomes utterly draining. The lack of supports for parents once their children are in care is a major area of frustration for social workers. I have experience as a social worker of trying to support parents and being told to focus on the child in care and that there was no time to focus on the parents. Previously, you might have been trying to support the two of them to prevent the child being taken into care in the first place. In cases where reunification has been ruled out, perhaps prematurely because the supports were not put in place, there is even more pressure not to help the parents. That ultimately has a knock on effect on the children, particularly in the continuing relationship with the parents.

I apologise if some of this has been mentioned before and I appreciate that the witnesses are the experts who deal with this every day. Certainly for me, when I reflect on it, it was a very adhoc thing. Sometimes it would work very well in some areas or with a particular principal social worker. In others, the principal social worker was the roadblock. There might be a trained person who wanted to do grief or trauma counselling with parents and was being told he or she could not do that. Grief counselling is essential for making access work. Access and continuing contact is essential to make reunification work.

I want to talk about these structural impediments. In her opening statement, Ms Swann mentioned the engagement with parents. Are there plans for ongoing engagement? Tusla has spent time trying to build up youth engagement and youth councils with the support of independent advocates. Is there a similar structure mirrored with the parents? How should Tusla be doing that? Are there places where Tusla structures or policies are roadblocks in relation to this kind of work? It would be very useful to highlight them for the committee in order that we could follow up with that agency in our own engagements. One thing that comes to mind is access and contact with parents. One last question, which may be outside the remit of the committee but which is important in terms of supporting parents, is about adequate access to justice when parents are in the court process. Is there sufficient legal aid and are there sufficient supports within the Courts Service? Some parents have told me that they did not even have a lawyer in the court. Usually in my experience, judges are very good at ensuring that parents have an advocate, at least in the judicial phase, but in court it is not just necessarily about having an advocate.

Ms Swann should respond first because her organisation was engaging with the parents.