Ms Aoife Bair?ad:

I thank the committee for inviting me today. My role is as an independent social worker. This is not a common role in Ireland and is different from roles such as guardian ad litem. I specialise in attachment and trauma and I mainly do assessments and therapeutic work with children, their parents and their foster families. I primarily work with children in care. My colleagues have highlighted the immediate needs of foster carers and foster families in terms of support, payments and retention. I support this and I am very happy to answer any questions on the necessity of these changes.

Given my role, I am going to focus on relationships and recovery for children in foster care. We all have attachment behaviours and they are organised around what we know. If our care is safe, we develop flexible emotional responses to dangers. If we see toddlers trying to pull something down on top of themselves, we might shout at them and a minute later we will comfort them if they are hurt. Insecure attachment means we are no longer flexible in this set of responses. We have a smaller set of responses. The more insecure we are, the narrower this set of responses is and the more widely we apply it.

Children who are abused and neglected have been hurt, frightened and left alone. They have developed responses that keep them safe in this context. When they are in their first foster care placement, they have an opportunity to develop an alternative worldview. In the first few months that children are placed in care, we often see a remarkable burst of development, such as walking, talking and feeding themselves. Emotional development can take longer and, depending on the trauma experienced by the child, this can take a serious toll on foster carers. Sadly, because of this, some foster placements end. Children find understanding the loss of this attachment figure much more difficult to comprehend than the more overt dangers they might have experienced at home. When they move into the next placement, they try to predict dangers they know they do not understand and cannot recognise. This can result in more heightened emotional and behaviour responses that become more profound over time. After three or more moves, the ability of children to achieve attachment security becomes unlikely if not impossible.

The Judiciary would benefit from understanding the need to prioritise the child's relationship with the carers in their first placement over all other relationships in the first 12 months the child is in care. This is true whether or not reunification is planned. Children can move from one secure attachment to another with relative ease but not from one insecure attachment to another. Judges, with the best intentions, seek to ensure children see their birth parents frequently. This is fine if the relationship is healthy, but often these relationships are full of pain and hurt on both sides. The children's experience can be that their carers, with whom they feel safe, frequently leave them with people or in places where they feel unsafe. These experiences can lead to lasting issues between the children and their foster carers even when the decision is made that the child will remain in the placement permanently. Judges should be provided with ongoing professional training to ensure they have the most up-to-date knowledge and evidence. They should also have access to an independent panel of experts to inform their decisions in the best interests of the children.

The most important factor for children recovering from abuse and trauma is finding safety in an attachment relationship. This requires that parents or carers have the right supports, resources and training so they can offer this to the children.

I strongly welcome the therapeutic support hubs being rolled out in Tusla. Every child in care should have a therapeutic support plan that considers the impact of his or her experiences at home and implements a therapeutic plan promptly, rather than waiting for behaviours to emerge before intervening.

However, the impact of trauma on development means other services will be needed. Over the past 17 years of working with children in care, I have repeatedly seen children’s referrals batted between Tusla, child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and disability services, each claiming the referrals are the others’ responsibility. Children who are in care are the State's responsibility and so the responsibility of all of these services. There should be a structure in place to scaffold these services around children in a systemic way. This is not a critique of any professional in these services. They all suffer from the same problem: too many referrals and too few staff and resources. As has been acknowledged by various professional bodies, every area of health and social care needs more graduates to fill posts, and they need the structures in place to keep those workers and avoid the disastrous turnover of staff that, from my experience, seems endemic in every area of the country, particularly in Tusla. Children, parents and foster carers have repeatedly said that, when they have a consistent social worker, their experiences with Tusla are largely positive. They frequently highlight multiple changes of social workers as undermining their trust in and experience of the service that is designed to protect them.

Positive relationships with their birth families are linked with more positive experiences of being in care. Difficult relationships with their birth family can undermine even the strongest of placements. Given this, every parent of a child in care needs specific, strategic support to help them build this. The national parent advocacy service that is being proposed needs to be in place so that the right supports can be offered to parents. To meet this need, in addition to the various addiction, mental health and pragmatic supports many parents require, they should have their own specialised supports focused on meeting their therapeutic needs as parents and attending to the therapeutic repair of the relationship with their children. Whether the child is staying in care or not, that remains equally important.

The needs of children in care are systemic, and while they are in care, the foster placement is the central pillar of that system. We must begin treating children, their foster families and their birth families holistically if we want their care experience to be what it should be: a place of safety, recovery and love.