Ms Caoilfhionn Gallagher:

I thank the Senator. She may have noticed how much I was nodding during many of the points she was making. From the outset when she was describing that systemic situation, the combination of the issues we are looking at, regarding difficulties with the child welfare and child protection system, the issues Judge Simms raised and the cross-agency and interagency concerns, combined with the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis and so on, means we are in a perfect storm that leads to very real risks for some of the most vulnerable children.

The Senator referred to children having traumatic care experiences. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of Judge Simms’s letter relates to the individual examples he gives, of which I might give just one that highlights precisely the point the Senator was making. He refers to a six-year-old girl who was placed in what the Child and Family Agency described to the court as unsuitable, unapproved, special emergency residential placement following the breakdown of four foster placements. This was a child who had come into State care, had the State as a corporate parent and then ended up in a position aged six where she went through four separate foster placements that broke down and then, before Judge Simms, there was a description of her being in an unsuitable, unapproved, special emergency residential placement. For a child of that age, that is heartbreaking. That is why I thought it was so important in the first session, when reference was made to how we talk about statistics, to highlight that behind each of them is an individual child who, in many cases, has been failed by the State, as that six-year-old was.

On restraint and seclusion, I may be able to give the committee some additional material of relevance. I should say I have acted for the International Coalition Against Restraint and Seclusion, ICARS, which comprises a large number of families in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales who have children with disabilities who have been restrained, and seriously injured in many cases, in certain residential settings and special school settings. Quite a lot of learning from those cases is very relevant to the question the Senator raised, and perhaps I can share some of that material with her. In short, there is very much a human rights issue regarding restraint and seclusion under the UNCRC and under domestic law. One of the issues, of course, is that if we end up with staff who are less experienced or a shortage of staff, it is more likely staff will then turn to using methods such as restraint that are intended to be an ultimate last resort and that can have profound physical and mental consequences for children.

On the information gaps in respect of trafficking, one key issue that emerged in IHREC's report last week is that there is a real problem with there being no data whatsoever relating to the source of referrals to the national referral mechanism. The understanding is that the majority of referrals are made through the criminal justice system. One of the key points being made by stakeholders, including healthcare professionals, relates to whether healthcare professionals or school professionals, for example, are making referrals. If we do not know the information and are blind to it, we cannot see where the gaps are, so the information gaps lead to us being essentially child blind. We will not understand what is happening in the system and then we will not be able to take steps to address it.

Turning to the Senator's point about resourcing, one issue of great concern to me relates to false economies that may end up causing much more serious problems financially for the State as well as in other ways. A good example of that is kinship care. A large number of children and young people are in informal kinship care, and the organisation Kinship Care Ireland has been rightly highlighting the fact that many children are being diverted to informal arrangements. The situation is, as the organisation has made clear in many of its submissions to the Government, that these are children at the edge of care, often being looked after by, for example, older grandparents, who are often invisible to the system and are saving the State millions of euro because if they had not stepped in, these children would be in State care. Not providing proper support in the kinship care space is very short-sighted because it may lead to further risks.

I wanted to come back to the issue of foster carers, because some points on that occurred to me during the first session. Foster carers are the backbone of State care in Ireland. Approximately 90% of placements are in foster care. As some of the committee's members have been pointing out for a number of years, including Deputy Costello, foster care services have been at breaking point for several years. This is not a new issue. In October 2022, a report by Tusla made clear the agency had lost more foster carers than it had been able to hire in the previous five years, and one of the key reasons for that relates to money. That is why a number of weeks ago, at the start of September, we saw a powerful protest outside Leinster House by demonstrating foster families, who said there was an urgent need to raise the allowance amid inflation. This is the position. The foster care allowance has not risen since 2009, which is why those families, who are deeply committed to foster care and who are also seeing the importance of other steps, were protesting to say there needed to be an increase in the foster care allowance. It has not risen for 14 years and it has not taken account of inflation. Moreover, there has been no revision to the rules on mileage expenses. As a result of all that, foster carers are subsidising State care. They are deeply committed people, but it is simply not an acceptable or sustainable position, which is partly why we got those stark figures in the October 2022 report from Tusla showing that more people are leaving the foster care system than are coming in.

This is an urgent matter that has been raised for a long time by Empowering People in Care, foster carers' organisations and others, and it is high time that was addressed. That is a very practical issue.

The other issue is that if we do not address that, it has other knock-on financial effects because it results in more placements out of area with private foster carers. This leads to far more disruption for the child, who is likely to be removed from his or her support network and friendship network. It also has financial ramifications for social services because it leads to more draws on social workers' time so there are fundamental issues there.

I am mindful of the time and there are other issues I might be able to raise later but with regard to the social worker recruitment crisis, I draw the committee's attention to a very powerful letter to The Irish Timesfrom Vivian Guerin of the National Association of Social Workers in January 2023 in which she said the social work recruitment crisis requires urgent action. I can provide this afterwards if it is helpful. In her letter, she said the social worker recruitment crisis has a particular feature that distinguishes it from other labour shortages, namely, social work spans multiple different areas. It involves child protection and welfare, on which we are focusing today, along with old age, criminal justice, housing and mental health. Vivian Guerin said that as a result of that and in contrast to other professions, the relevant political and policy responsibility is under the auspices of a number of Ministers and Departments. In practical terms, no single Minister, Department or agency has overarching responsibility for strategic planning and management for social work services. She highlighted this issue. Going back to the information gap, she highlighted the fact that we do not even have reliable data on a series of issues about numbers of social workers employed in the country, who they are, where they are deployed and so on. She said that the upshot is that social work workforce planning at national level has been in free fall for some time and called for a non-siloed approach to this critical issue. This is a vitally important issue, she was right to raise it and I commend that letter to the committee.