Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 July 2025

Committee on Children and Equality

Engagement with Tusla

2:00 am

Photo of Ruairí Ó MurchúRuairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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The witnesses dealt with a significant amount around foster carers and those pieces that have been done and need to be done, because we need to attract as many people as possible.

I will talk about something that is historical and was brought to my attention after the fact. I get that Tusla will go out to family settings. Sometimes that is suitable for putting somebody into care. I am just using this an example. I think I bought it up at the committee before. It was a case where this guy was left with his uncle, and his uncle took him around to collect his drug debt. While they were very minor debts, he had been brought from chaos and put into a situation that was still within the family but was not a whole lot better, from what I can see. It is how we ensure that those circumstances do not arise and, beyond that, that the triggering mechanism happens fast enough. We want to see early interventions and avoidance of it. There are, however, situations and circumstances we have all seen where it will never make sense how, even when we took the kids, we left them that long in desperate situations.