Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I want to ask the Taoiseach about the crisis facing many children who are in Tusla's care. I spoke to an impressive young man a couple of weeks ago. He is a 16-year-old who is in care. He has been in care for about ten years. He lived with his mother for the first five or six years of his life and then he was taken into care. He is currently 16 and lives with his grandmother. He said that up until he was about 15 and a half, the service he had from Tusla was amazing. He always had a social worker who was very supportive and so on. About a year ago, his social worker left him. He was told that it would only take a couple of weeks for the social worker to be replaced, but the social worker has still not been replaced. Instead, he has got a part-time social care worker who is not a qualified social worker and is not able to give the same support that a social worker is able to give and the support that he is supposed to get. It is even affecting his ability to have visits with his mother. They have to be supervised visits but the absence of staff has meant that it has been difficult to get visits.

This is apparently not an isolated case. The children in care team is operating at about 30% capacity. The same issues we have seen with nurses and teachers are now affecting social workers, particularly in Dublin. There is another issue, which is accommodation. Some 500 children a year turn 18, come out of care, and a big number go straight into homeless services because there is no or very little proper, appropriate accommodation for people who are emerging from care in that way.

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