Ms Réidín Dunne:

We should acknowledge that when women who are involved in addiction medicine are pregnant, we know from very early on that they are pregnant. Often, women know by month one or month two. At that point, we are engaging with social work, asking for support and preplanning and, if there is a capacity assessment to be done, asking for it to done in month one or two so we can look at issues in relation to it. It is coming too late. Our women are often experiencing crisis pregnancy and the State offers a crisis response. We do not take the time to ask the woman what she feels about the pregnancy or what kind of mother she wants to be. Because we engage at a crisis, child-protection level all the time, we are not holding her as an expectant mammy. We are dealing with her as a drug-using woman who is also now pregnant. When many of our women are pregnant or when their children are subject to child protection concerns, there is an intense scrutiny. When the child is removed into care, all the scrutiny, which can be seen by the woman as very supportive, evaporates. Once you support mammy to support the kinship arrangement, that arrangement - it is not a placement - is far more likely to succeed because mammy can see and support the family functioning. However, once the child is removed into care, we often bypass the mother and no longer engage with her as a mother. She is still that child's mother.

She may be parenting from afar or parenting very differently but supporting her in her role as mother and helping to process that will also support family functioning.