Dr. Fiona O'Reilly:

In short, of course, there are ways we can do things differently. We have to be pragmatic and recognise the new world, acknowledging that our policies come from a time when we were able to tell everybody's age. We looked at children and asked whether they needed to be protected by the State but we knew how old they were because everybody remembers when they were born. We now have a new landscape and we need to do things differently, from big policy to pragmatic differences. In big policy, we can open up how we welcome people into the country. They do not all have to come in through the asylum-seeking international protection system. If we made other avenues for people to come, make a better life and live and work here, we might reduce the number of people coming through the international protection system, for starters.

Of course, Tusla would like to put everyone who is determined to be a child into a perfect placement with culturally competent guidance, but we cannot do that. Putting people who may well be children, as a lot are, into adult accommodation is not the answer. There is an in-between. For people who are being assessed and might turn out to be children, where it may take months to carry out that assessment, we can put them into special accommodation with small numbers of people of a similar age. I refer to something between what IPAs are living with in emergency accommodation, which is not satisfactory at all, and the really good placements that people who are determined to be children are put into. Perhaps that is what the new system will do, but that is not what is there. Every step of the way, we need to think outside the box and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.