Professor Eilion?ir Flynn:

Thinking about the question about why we still have these residential units, as Nem Kearns already covered, too often, disabled parents do not have any suitable accommodation to return to after the birth of their child so they might simply need accommodation and that is why people end there. There are also people, not just disabled people but maybe young parents and other people, who might need more support in terms of their parenting, particularly with a newborn child than they can get wherever they are living. The idea is that you do not just have to leave hospital and be completely on your own. You can have support by being in this setting where staff are on hand to help and support you in learning things as a new parent. Ideally this would not be the case. Ideally people would have a safe and secure home to go to and support would be provided to them in their home. Otherwise you are learning skills in a very artificial setting and are then expected to apply them in a different setting and for some people, that is not a very effective way to learn those new parenting skills. We agree that this is a practice that ideally should not exist and instead we should provide people with the support they need in their natural home environment and make sure they have a safe and secure home in which to parent. Sadly, this is not the case for everyone.

Regarding the barriers in fostering and how this lines up with the challenges that are expressed in finding suitable foster placements or prospective foster parents, Ireland is not unique in facing this dilemma. One of our international colleagues in Iceland had to take a case to its supreme court as a disabled person who wanted to foster and was prevented from taking a mandatory training course for all prospective foster parents. This person is now successfully fostering but one of the things that was said to her during this process was that because she had such a complex physical disability and had personal assistants coming in and out of her home and life, it would be too confusing for a child to understand who is the parent and who is the personal assistant. Freyja Haraldsdóttir is the name of this activist. She has described how her foster son knows very well the difference between her as a parent and her personal assistants because when he is cross with her, he will be rude to her and polite to her personal assistants. Again, children and young people are well able to understand these differences and it is perhaps our prejudices and presumption about what people think about disability that maybe prevents us from having a more open and inclusive attitude to how many amazing foster parents there are, particularly foster parents of disabled children. Disabled foster parents could make amazing foster placements for disabled children. An example is the deaf family that fostered. It was a really positive experience for that family. The mother in that family had grown up in a family where there was no sign language so she really relished the idea of being able to give a child a family home in which their natural language was spoken. It would be amazing to see more of that and I think more people would be willing to do it if they did not experience the pushback in the early stages of the system, which does tend to discourage people from going into these roles.