Mr. Rory Brown:

There was reference to the issue of support for foster carers and to aftercare supports. The hardest issue for me in my foster care was that, at 18 years of age, my foster carers could not support me any more. When people turn 18, the aftercare support goes to the person who has experienced care. Unfortunately, my foster family was not in a financial position to keep my room open in their house and financially support me to go to college. Once I got the aftercare support, I went off to college. To keep my room open for me at weekends, I would have had to pay rent to my foster family, but I could not afford to pay rent in Limerick and to them. If we are looking at improving support for care leavers, we should look at that situation whereby many of them lose their homes when they reach 18 years of age. Many foster carers want to keep these young people in their homes but are unable to do so because of their financial position. They are faced with a decision as to whether they take in another foster child and keep the financial support they are getting or keep the care leaver's room open and lose that money because he or she is going off to college or different things. That caused a lot of issues for me as I was coming up to the age of 18. It would be brilliant if we could support both care leavers and their foster families because it would keep a lot of care-experienced young people in higher level education and allow them to come out of the risk of poverty and break the barriers many of them face. Once they reach 18, they either face homelessness or poverty-stricken issues associated with their foster family.

Connected to that is the importance of social workers. In my experience, there was a constant rotation of social workers. I easily dealt with 15 or 20 of them in my ten or 11 years in care. It may have been more; those are just the ones I can remember. There were many who breezed in for two or three months before leaving with a "See you later". I might have only chatted to them once. This means you have to tell your story again and again. Their caseloads mean they do not know you or anything about you, so you have to keep telling your story and that causes trust issues. If you have to keep telling your story over and over and repeating the trauma you have already faced, you start getting annoyed at the system and then you start lashing out or causing issues because you do not and cannot trust anyone. You are thinking, "Sure, they are going to leave in six months and what is the point of telling them my story if they are going to leave me." That is where the issues are. We need to be able to retain social workers and have one person, or even two, dealing with a child. I know people retire and move on, but if children in care had one or two constant people they could trust, they would have security and feel okay to open up and talk about their problems and needs. Many of them do not have that and instead just lash out and get labelled. That is where the stigma comes about against children in care.