Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire ar ais chuig an Seanad. I concur with my Sinn Féin colleague. The current position with Tusla as highlighted in the HIQA report means we are failing children and their interactions with youth services.

The report highlighted a number of key performances where Tusla is failing in its duties, one of which was the inconsistencies in practice around the screening of allegations and making preliminary inquiries. While Tusla focused on examining current risk to children, that often resulted in a lack of urgency in responding to retrospective allegations of abuse against adults of concern. This meant that children who are potentially at risk from adults who are alleged to have abused children in the past or who were convicted of child sexual abuse in the past and now have access to other children may be missed.

I am particularly concerned as to how Tusla and the Department intend to deal with retrospective child protection cases that Tusla has now deemed to be completed or closed but were not investigated to their full extent. Will the Minister outline the steps she intends to make on this?

Furthermore, what immediate steps can she take to aid Tusla with its heavy case load? In response to a parliamentary question from my colleague, Deputy Denise Mitchell, in March, the Minister said there were 25,000 open cases in the system at the end of December 2017, of which 5,000 were awaiting the allocation of a social worker. Of those cases, there were a number of high priority cases, where a child is considered to be at high risk of abuse, with unallocated social workers. Of those, 198 were waiting under one month, 189 were waiting between one to three months and 346 were waiting three months or more. Tusla was unable to provide a waiting time for a further 87 cases. That is indicative of poor record keeping.

I am cognisant not just of the Health Service Executive, HSE, which is rightly getting a battering lately for its policies, procedures and lack of care, especially for women, but I am cognisant also of the hard working staff in Tusla. They were my colleagues and many of them tell me they are terrified of going out socially and people asking them what they do. They will not say they work for Tusla. They are subjected to abuse because they are being blamed for the mismanagement of the policies and the report that has been produced. These are the ordinary people, like the HSE staff, who are fire fighting because that is all they can do lately. Recruitment and retention is the biggest issue. As my colleague, Senator Conway-Walsh said, there has been a gain of only 18 despite an influx of social work staff. We cannot have a situation where caring staff are ashamed of their title and of their work. I want to put on the record that that is not their fault. They are the backbone in terms of protection for children and health services in our country.

We have failed to fully implement issues arising from last year’s report into section 12 of the Child Care Act by Professor Geoffrey Shannon. He stated: "Consideration should be given to having social workers assigned to specialist child protection units", and that there should be a review of legislation to ensure that there are no legal roadblocks which might impede, "child protection services sharing information relating to vulnerable children and their families". Will the Government now consider specialist child protection units to ensure that no child is failed again? As I am sure we all agree, one child failed is one too many and the current failings of Tusla, as outlined in the report, is a calamity.