Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration

General Scheme of the International Protection Bill 2025: Discussion

2:00 am

Ms Lorna Kavanagh:

Every child who arrives is met on the day they arrive and accommodated on the day they arrive. Sometimes, up to 15 children arrive on any one day so that is a considerable pressure on the service. The priority is to provide for the child's immediate needs such as somewhere to sleep, someone to look after him or her and food and clothes. We have had to rely on special emergency arrangements, SEAs, where we have agency staff looking after children in rented properties. We have opened a huge amount of additional capacity in terms of residential beds to reduce our reliance on special emergency arrangements. We try to keep children's placements in those SEAs as short as possible so they move very quickly into registered centres. To some extent, we benefit from the fact that a lot of the children who arrive and are aged 17 age out, which creates capacity. That then brings us to Mr. Herrick's issue in IHREC in relation to aftercare.

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