Dr. Maria Corbett:

I was involved with the four-person review group that carried out an independent review of special care. It is great that the committee is engaging with the CEO on it. The report maps out a series of recommendations. As stated earlier, a critical issue is the retention and recruitment of the social care staff in special care units. There are real difficulties in the context of retention and recruitment. Some of those difficulties relate to the salary on offer, which is the same that for working in a different unit. There is a very small top-up, particularly in light of the nature of the work these people do. As was stated in the report, some progress has been made on that but not enough.

On the interagency piece, the nature of the issues children present with requires more engagement from specialists in addiction and mental health. When we were reviewing it, we could see that while the assessment, consultation and therapeutic service, ACTS, which is the service in Tusla that provides specialist support, exists, we could not document that there was sufficient therapeutic support being provided in the units. As the Deputy will be aware, special care is unique in the sense that it is the civil detention of a child in circumstances where they have not committed a crime, and there must be a therapeutic rationale. That is stated in case law but it is not in statute. One of the recommendations is that it would be important to clarify that in the statute. In our engagement, we were a bit concerned that there was not as much of a focus on that. The focus was more on the fact that the child is at risk, but people only really need to be detained if there is a therapeutic benefit. In addition, you also need to evidence that you are making the effort to provide therapeutic support in order to ensure that the detention is clearly lawful, particularly as it is a significant intervention. I am very happy to talk further about the report at a different time if that is of use.