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

The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, opened by saying that child protection is simply too important to be used as a political football. In fairness to the Minister, he did not engage in political football through his speech. He set out some issues regarding child protection, which I will get into because his Department's approach is very inadequate. That approach of not using this issue as a political football lasted for as long as the Minister was speaking. All subsequent Government speakers were all about using it as a political football.

The reason we are debating this today, shamefully, is for the topic to be used as a political football. Most people around the country are quite unhappy to see that this is how this issue is being treated. I am not interested in engaging in that. I am interested in raising some serious issues of child protection that are the responsibility of this Government, which has had the power to remedy all of these serious issues for the last five years. Between them, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have had that power for 100 years but have chosen not to do so. The Government has the biggest budget surplus in the history of the State and has chosen not to remedy the serious child protection failures which are ongoing across the State right now. That tells us a lot about where the Government's priorities lie. I believe they are not with child protection but, instead, with corporate protection, protecting the interests of big business and the wealthy in this country, and to hell with everyone else, including particularly vulnerable children.

The Ombudsman for Children said last July that the State should ask itself how it has fallen so far that it is unable to provide a highly vulnerable child in the care of the State with a safe and stable place to live and a social worker, a trusted adult that they know will care for them. He answered that question by stating it is a combination of Government intransigence and neglect. That neglect is obvious when we look at the treatment of children in the care of the State and in the care of private companies contracted and paid for by the State, which families themselves sometimes have to pay, an issue I will come to. The Child Law Project reported last July that judges were in despair over the lack of appropriate places for children in care and that this was having a domino effect that risks collapsing the care system. One judge warned that the lack of places was a tsunami about to reach shore and nothing was being done. He said it was only by the graces of God that some of the kids involved were still alive.

The Government's response was not to deal with the crisis in the childcare system but to end funding for the Child Law Project. It shut down the only public source of information we have on the childcare system. Researchers have not been sent to observe court proceedings since June because funding for the project has been axed. We have reference in the Minister's speech to a new reporting system, sharing the opinion that court reporting is important and should be retained into the future. That would give the impression that is happening right now. It is not happening right now. It needs to be reinstated. It seems that it will be several months, at least, before a new reporting system is established. We need a date, and should have had one from the Minister today, for when this vital reporting will be re-established.

Fears that children without an appropriate care place are at risk of death are well grounded. Last year, 29 young people in care, in aftercare or known to Tusla died. Twenty-three died in 2022. Those tragic deaths are only the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath is a maelstrom of underresourcing and State neglect. The crisis in childcare places is now so bad that vulnerable children are routinely being warehoused in Airbnbs and holiday homes operated by private, for-profit companies and staffed by unqualified attendants. Of course, the companies involved are making a tidy profit. "Prime Time" reported last May that 166 minors were left in this type of unsuitable private accommodation. Shockingly, that includes babies, toddlers and preschool children as well as older kids. Conditions in some cases are so bad that charity workers and social workers have been left in tears after visiting the children. Of course, the Government knows all of this. This is not news. It chooses not to fix it despite the billions available to it. It chooses not to improve wages and conditions for social workers, finance the construction of purpose-built, appropriate care facilities or support families to prevent children from being taken into care in the first place.

With respect to supporting families, the Government is failing badly. I have tried to highlight repeatedly in this Dáil the way in which the supervised access system is being exploited by unscrupulous private companies. It illustrates the failure to support parents and the failings in the public system. Current and former access supervisors, as well as parents, have contacted me to explain how this has become an ethics-free exploitation zone for profit-hungry private companies. Unlike every other European country, we have no public supervised access service. It is exclusively provided by private companies. The State, in the form of courts, says the only way people are going to see their kids is with supervised access, but the State refuses to provide any service for such access. Private companies are the only ones which provide it. Parents have no choice but to pay large sums of money to private companies to see their children.

I have a costings list from one of those companies, Supervised Access Ireland. The rates are €34.75 an hour, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Saturday, and €44.50 an hour on Sunday. If parents want to see their child for four hours, they have to pay between €139 and €178. For people on the minimum wage, that is more than a third of their weekly wages. It is up to three quarters of the weekly payments for someone on jobseeker's allowance. On top of that, some private companies are additionally overcharging parents. One parent forced to use the services of Supervised Access Ireland said they had to pay for a three-hour visit when getting two hours and had to pay for a four-hour visit when getting three. It is hard to comprehend this as anything other than a State-sanctioned form of ransom, and a profitable ransom at that. Supervised Access Ireland charges parents more than double what it pays supervisors in their wages for the equivalent time. Children as well as parents suffer from this. Kids cannot see their parents because the parents cannot afford the extortionate fees the private companies charge.

I asked the Taoiseach about this last summer. I asked if any financial assistance could be provided for parents. He replied that it was the responsibility of the parents to pay for access arrangements and that they were obliged to pay private companies for the service. He said he acknowledged the stress that this can cause for families. The Taoiseach acknowledges the stress for vulnerable kids missing their mother or father but he does not propose to do anything about it despite having a €25 billion surplus. Bear in mind the children in access situations have already lost a significant amount of contact with their parents. Now the State is standing over a situation that makes it harder for them to rebuild their relationship with parents who want to see them and to rebuild their relationship. It is cruelty by the State to the children.

To make matters worse, the service being provided by some of these private companies is substandard, to put it mildly. Employees have told me that workers were hired and sent on shift without any face-to-face interviews or even the most basic of checks. They said that in more than one instance, an access worker was sent out without any Garda vetting being done as well as not having appropriate checks with regard to indemnity insurance. This was allowed to happen with vulnerable children who were in the care of the State all over the country and facilitated by the company to maximise profits. This company maximises profits at the expense of the safety and well-being of children. When I raised this scandal in parliamentary questions to the Minister, he claimed that Tusla ceased using the services of this particular company in February 2024. However, Tusla records show that it has paid the same company over €100,000 for its services for this year, 2024. That would be a very large sum if it was only working for six weeks. I also have it on good authority that supervised access jobs are still being advertised by the company in question. If there is a sum-up at the end, perhaps the Minister could address this and at least pledge to investigate it. If the Government is serious about child protection and is not just using it as a political football to score points, it must act to fix the broken child protection system.

The final point I will make is that another party leader referred to how if a complaint was made against a senior elected representative in her party, she would know about it. That is troubling. Good practice here is to have an independent process and for the party leader not to be told. I do not know whether Deputy Mary Lou McDonald was told or not but I know that good practice would be for her not to be told about a complaint. Things should be done genuinely independently. That was quite concerning and questions need to be asked.

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