Ms Anna Kavanagh:

Earlier this year, legislation was brought in in the UK that has lifted in camera rule so that, currently, the in camera rule is gone in more than half of the family courts in England and Wales. That is something that really needs to be done here in Ireland.

To pick up on the Deputy's point about justice and the courts, Ellen Coyne did a report earlier this week in the Irish Independent. Tusla, in my opinion, appears to be a law unto itself. Tusla is in breach of six High Court orders to provide specialist care for vulnerable teens. If I failed to comply with a High Court order, I would be deemed to be in contempt of court, and if I failed to purge my contempt, I would end up in jail. One of the mothers of one of the children actually brought a case to the High Court in April to have Tusla found in contempt of a High Court ruling to provide specialist care for her son but the judge, in that particular case, rejected her appeal. As we speak, Tusla is currently in contempt of six High Court orders to provide specialist care for vulnerable teens.

The other thing is that Finbar has spoken up about what the social workers have done. The registration body for Tusla is CORU, and it was the subject of an "RTÉ Investigates" programme by Barry O'Kelly last year. One of the things he uncovered is that Tusla is the body that is supposed to regulate psychologists but it has not actually taken the moves to do that. Currently, anybody can call themselves a psychologist and they can go into court and present expert reports. The judges are then making their judgments based on these expert reports coming from people who are not actually qualified. We are all familiar with Maurice McCabe, Tusla and the copy-and-paste error. It was all dealt with in the Charleton tribunal in 2017. The three social workers involved did not actually come before CORU until December 2023. That is more than six years later. CORU then decided that it was going to carry out this investigation in private. The whole thing is that there is actually no transparency and there does not appear to be any accountability for Tusla when it fails to protect children.

We had a situation earlier this year, in February, where the Minister with responsibility for children, Roderic O'Gorman, speaking at Tusla's celebration of ten years in existence, actually stated, according to a report by Jack Power in The Irish Times, that Tusla never caused him or the Government a moment of concern. That is really alarming given that the retired judge, Judge Simms, sent four reports to the Minister, Roderic O'Gorman, voicing his concerns about issues relating to children in State care.

We also had the UCD report in June 2023 - a very comprehensive report, I might add - said that children in residential care were being trafficked by predatory males into the sex industry. Deputy Peadar Tóibín, in the Dáil in February, raised the situation of one child who had gone missing. She was missing for 14 months and was actually found locked up in a brothel. These are the kinds of issues we are dealing with, and then when mothers-----