Ms Aine McGuirk:

We are delighted to appear before the committee today and hope that the IASW can be of assistance to the members in their deliberations on the issue of recruitment and retention in Tusla. I am Aine McGuirk, chair of the Irish Association of Social Workers, and with me today is Joe McCarthy, one of our members of long standing who has much experience in this area. I will keep this statement to five minutes so that we can explore issues and take questions. It will be quite short because I discovered that five minutes is quite short when one times oneself.

Social workers employed in the area of child protection and welfare practise their skills in a high-risk environment where there are no perfect solutions and where their efforts are rarely recognised or acknowledged. The nature of social work is dealing with risk, making the best professional judgment one can when one assesses a child’s situation to be good enough for one to close the door and move on to the next child’s story. These are incredible professionals and we must consider how we can promote a positive view of the work they do for children and families in crisis.

Social workers bring a range of skills to their work as they help clients negotiate the difficult and complex systems of Irish society in the 21st century. Families never complain when they have been waiting for a while for Tusla to come and complete an assessment of a child welfare concern. These are largely silent, involuntary clients in an imperfect world and the social worker’s skill is in facilitating the family or child to achieve good outcomes often against impossible odds.

Social workers need to be properly supported to do this difficult work and to be acknowledged by society rather than being constantly blamed. Social workers championed the development of child protection services. It was social workers who began to respond to child abuse in the 1970s beginning the process for a slow uncovering of a difficult and shameful past over the next decades.

The profession needs to attract the best to take on this work. It needs to be carried out to the highest standards. Social workers need to be bright, well educated, resilient, enthusiastic professionals with a drive for social justice and ethical practice. Members should consider if they would encourage their child to pursue this career and if not, why.

In the IASW we have been concerned about the recruitment and retention issues in Tusla for some time. We meet its chief operations officer, Jim Gibson, and its director of human resources, Colette Walsh. We see no evidence of a national recruitment campaign and potential candidates must go to the Tusla website to see if there are vacancies.

While recruitment is certainly a significant issue leading to an overuse of expensive agency staff and presents as a significant issue nationally, retention may in fact be the more significant problem. Just-qualified staff quickly find themselves dealing with complex child welfare and protection cases, complicated legal proceedings, and making life-changing decisions for children and families. To support staff we must also retain in-post team leaders and principal social workers who provide essential leadership in the provision of front-line services to children and families.

While all social work has stresses, the children and families sector is recognised as the most difficult work. These social workers exercise a statutory role, including the taking of proceedings under the Child Care Act 1991, and ensure the operation of State regulations with regard to children in care. The provision of care to children and families is complex with high demands from the law, the court and its agents. Social workers appear as applicants in the court for Tusla. Here, their professional actions and opinion are subjected to the highest scrutiny in a different way to other professionals who appear in the case as either agents of the court or professional witnesses. This can be extremely difficult and stressful for inexperienced social workers who are just doing their best to provide a professional service to the child who is the subject of the proceedings.

The work of Tusla comes under the scrutiny of the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, whose representatives spoke to this committee on this issue last month. The child and families sector is now the most regulated, inspected and audited area of social work. While regulation is necessary and useful in ensuring compliance with agreed standards, this scrutiny is grounds for further stresses, placing an emphasis on paperwork as evidence of work done, rather than on the practice of social work. The attendant negative attention from the media long after the inspection causes further stresses for perhaps already demoralised staff who work well beyond a standard working week to deal with the families on their caseload.

In 2019, social problems are more complex and acute than ever, and are more plentiful and concentrated in large urban centres. Abuse, ill-treatment and neglect are found across all communities. These situations are characterised by secrecy, emotional isolation, neediness, stress and lack of respect, often hidden under a cloak of normalcy. Social workers become very skilled in working with this kind of family but they require time and guidance to develop such competencies. Addiction, poor educational outcomes, abuse, unemployment, mental and physical health problems, intellectual disability, homelessness and injustice are the backdrop to the day-to-day work of a social worker. Today, drugs are available country wide, with their attendant social problems, deprivation and marginalisation. If one walks up Merchant's Quay, Dublin or see a wet, dirty sleeping bag filled with a sleeper in a doorway, one may well be looking at the face of a parent of a child in care, or an adult that was raised in State care. These realities are a construction of society, not social work.

Tusla social workers deal with people in their homes and communities. Some communities have become hostile places increasing the risks associated with home visiting. Violence as a solution has become more commonplace, and guns and other weaponry are the tools of the drug dealer. Tusla social workers must deal with families in all these environments, including areas that other services sometimes refuse to enter.

Today, in some social work offices, there is security at the door, restricted entry to their buildings and meeting rooms monitored by closed-circuit television cameras. As a result, the social worker draws on all of their professional knowledge and training to deal with these families in an empathetic, supportive and helpful way. I am increasingly struck by the capacity of these young professionals to build relationships with individuals and families in this context, and give children a chance at a better life either with their parents or in the care of foster or residential carers. Fresh from college the young graduate may face an inevitable future as follows: work for Tusla for a couple of years - because that is where the jobs are - to get experience, and then move on to an agency where work is less high risk, clients are happy to engage, hours of attendance are predictable and conducive to a better work-life balance, and where public opinion is more positive, or work for a couple of years to earn enough money to travel and consider the future from far away sunnier climes. Tusla must work hard to become an employer of choice where the benefits of staying outweigh the stresses of the work. We understand that this is a difficult issue to solve quickly. We have made suggestions in our full submission, which members received. We are to address them now and answer any other questions they might have.