Written answers
Wednesday, 26 November 2025
Department of Children, Disability and Equality
Child and Family Agency
Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)
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265. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the measures in place to ensure consistency in priority decisions across all Tusla areas; and if she will provide the most recent compliance checks for each area. [66374/25]
Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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As this relates to Tusla operational matters and procedures around prioritisation and compliance, I have referred your question to Tusla to reply to you directly
Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)
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271. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the steps her Department is taking to improve Tusla ICT and record-keeping systems, including plans for real-time data on allocation, priority level, and service access for children. [66380/25]
Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you Deputy for your question on improving Tusla ICT capability.
As you are aware, Tusla was established in 2014 with a challenging remit to bring many unique and separate services (primarily previously delivered by the HSE) and over 4,000 staff under one Agency. This diverse range of services included Child Protection and Welfare, Adoption and Tracing, Regulation of Early Years Services, Education and Welfare Services, Fostering, Aftercare and Residential Services.
Effectively, pre-2014, all services operated paper-based systems or, at best used limited legacy ICT systems that were not fit for purpose.
To enhance Tusla’s Data, Digital and ICT environment, the Agency established a dedicated ICT Directorate in 2018 that delivered the first ICT and Data Management Strategies from 2018 to 2023 and it’s successor strategy 2024 – 2026
The new strategy continues the aim to maximise the benefits of data management and digital innovation in supporting the work of Tusla. It is informed by the Irish Public Service Data Strategy; Connecting Government 2030: A Digital and ICT Strategy for Ireland’s Public Service; other related policy and legislation as well guidance published by relevant Irish authorities such as the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), the Data Protection Commission, National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OGCIO).
This strategy is anchored by Tusla’s Vision, Mission, Values and Behaviours. It will seek to maximise data management and digital innovation to support Tusla and their partners in the delivery of services to children, young people, families, and communities.
Tusla’s values underpin the strategy by progressing a culture that promotes a recognition amongst all staff of the benefits of good data management and their responsibility to ensure the quality, respect, and privacy of the data they process in the course of their duties.
Trust is established as one of the core values of Tusla and with it the privacy of data held is of utmost importance to Tusla. Data privacy is accordingly continued as a key focus of this strategy with all actions underpinned by a focus on ensuring that the data Tusla holds is managed with respect and in line with the best principles of data protection.
Tusla Case Management System (TCM), launched in 2021, provides a single, integrated case management system that, over time, will be implemented across all Tusla services. TCM provides a single view of each child, young person, family, care provider and others who are engaged with Tusla. The vision for this system is to support all Tusla functions to work in an efficient and joined-up way in the delivery of services. TCM is currently being used by the majority of services across Tusla, and will continue to be extended to become the single integrated case management system across all Agency services providing:
Joined-up digital systems and data for joined up services. TCM will provide a single integrated case management across all Tusla services.
- A single view of the child, family and their connections across all services and all engagements with Tusla.
- Excellence in record keeping. TCM will continue to be designed for comprehensive and ease of record-keeping supporting the full information life cycle of our case files.
- Data privacy by design. Data protection considerations will continue to permeate all aspects of TCM.
- Ease of use. TCM was designed by practitioners for practitioners as an intuitive system to use. It included capabilities like dashboards, wizards, templates and auto complete to support users in finding and entering data.
In effect, Tusla is building an integrated data environment centred around TCM that will enable the Agency to deliver improved integrated reporting by the end of the Tusla Data Management and Digital Transformation Strategy 2024-2026. This strategy was reviewed by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, and is aligned with the overall public sector data strategy.
Tusla has conducted significant work since 2019 to improve compliance with Data Protection legislation. Increased training of staff and move to digitisation of records and notes as part of Tusla Case Management. Relationship has been developed with the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) and good view of Tusla currently held by DPC.
In July 2021, Tusla expedited and extended the ambition of the planned migration from the HSE ICT network. Between July 2021 and November 2022 Tusla successfully delivered an €8 million programme to build its own ICT Infrastructure (Tusla IRL) and to migrate all offices, staff, devices and data to the new network. Tusla now has its own dedicated modern ICT network connecting over 250 Tusla offices and 6,000 users.
Building on its existing data architecture Tusla has live information available to practitioners and are constantly expanding their data analytics capabilities.
DCDE supports Tusla through the Estimates process to secure significant financial resources to deliver and manage services. Next year Tusla’s budget will increase by €165m to over €1.3bn in Budget 2026. And more specific example is the digitisation and indexing of the State's historical adoption records, this major project delivered by Tusla over the last 2 years was funded and supported by the DCDE and has so far delivered the digitising and indexing of 3 million pages of records. These records are now available in the archive where they are available to support the work of Birth Information and Tracing.
Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)
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273. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the vacancy rate for social workers in each Tusla area, and the number of posts that have remained unfilled for more than six months. [66382/25]
Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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I wish to inform the Deputy that my officials have asked Tusla to respond directly to you on this matter
Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)
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275. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the escalation procedures used when a high-priority case remains unallocated for more than one week; and the number of cases escalated under these procedures in 2023 and 2024. [66384/25]
Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you Deputy, for your question on this matter. As this relates to Tusla operational matters and procedures around unallocated child protection cases, I have referred your question to Tusla to reply to you directly
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