Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 19 June 2025
Committee on Children and Equality
Engagement with Children's Rights Alliance
2:00 am
Dr. Maria Corbett:
No problem. The key point I would like to make is about the care system, which comprises foster and residential care. There is an acute shortage of places around the country. There is a need for more places, but there is also a need for diversification in the type of placements available, and that will require legal, policy and regulatory reform. What I am talking about here is a different type of placement that would often be described as high support, that offers not just a residential or foster care placement but also therapeutic supports and maybe a higher staff ratio, and, which is critical, potentially restrictive practices in terms of being able to restrict a child's movement, access to their phone or access to the Internet. That is a gap and we cannot fill it unless we have policy, regulatory and legal reform to allow the system to reintroduce high support. We had it in the past but we do not have it under the current model.
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