Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I propose to take Questions Nos. 9 and 197 together.

Under the Child Care Act 1991 and the Child and Family Agency Act 2013, the newly established Child and Family Agency has a statutory duty to promote the welfare of children who are not receiving adequate care and protection. The placement of children in care is governed by regulations. These provide for the welfare of children and for care practices, care records, accommodation and safety precautions to be overseen. The regulations also provide that a social worker oversees the implementation of a care plan, visits the child to whom it relates and sees him or her in private and reads the records relating to the child in the centre. That is the practice which obtains. Depending on their needs, children may often be placed in foster care. We are very lucky that the vast majority - over 90% - of children in care are either with relatives or general foster carers. A minority of children in care are the subject of residential care, high support care, special care or other placement types.

It is important to note that all children's services are inspected against regulation and national standards. The Health Information Quality Authority, HIQA, has played a particularly important role in this regard. The Deputy will be aware of the range of reports we received from HIQA during the past year on residential settings. The Child and Family Agency is obliged to respond to each of those reports, indicate the action it is taking and address the issues which have been identified. Last year, I asked HIQA to take responsibility not just for residential settings, but to examine the position with regard to child protection teams. We have already received a number of reports from it on the services being provided by those teams.

This is a work in progress and there are variations in standards. We want to move towards national consistency in terms of adherence to absolute best practice. There are some very bad legacy issues in respect of these services and change will not happen overnight. However, in the context of the reports it compiled in recent months, HIQA has returned to matters it examined previously and discovered that huge improvements have been made. An example in this regard is the special care unit at Ballydowd, of which there had been criticism. The most recent report on the unit was extremely positive. The same is true of Waterford. HIQA returned to it, examined the services on offer and provided a much more positive report.

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