Dr. Maria Corbett:

There is a national policy that residential care should be for children over the age of 12. Historically, residential care has been for children who come into care in their teenage years. They may want to stay with a sibling or there may be some other reason. In my previous role, I was with the Child Law Project. We were doing the court reporting of cases and published a number of cases of very young children being placed in residential care. The issue there is that those children have behavioural issues, most likely linked to disability. They are in some way distressed and the foster carers are unable to manage them. There is a real need for us to look again at the types of care placements we have and the level of support. We could potentially explore introducing specialist foster carers to manage the behaviour of those types of children or consider what the disability services are doing. Did they address this child's needs at an earlier stage? Do they know of this child's case? Residential care has an important role within the alternative care suite of services but we need to be careful about children, in particular those very young children, being placed inappropriately in residential care. That is one thing.

On aftercare, there is considerable concern around homelessness for care leavers. Empowering People in Care, EPIC, which is one of the member organisations of the Children's Rights Alliance, has been advocating around that issue.

The Senator also asked about mother and baby units. I did a piece of work with one of the maternity hospitals. There is very little opportunity for a mother to stay with her child in a residential setting and provide family support. There is the Bessborough Centre in Cork but we do not have a range of services like that. There is a piece of published work from the maternity hospitals that may be of interest. I can share it with the Senator.