Good evening chair, members of the committee, and committee staff. My apologies that I am not there in person; as I think members know, weather intervened so I am joining the meeting remotely. I thank the committee for extending this invitation to me this evening and indeed for the late hour it is sitting to have this session. I was appointed to the role in February of this year, and this is the first occasion on which I am appearing before the committee. I am very grateful for the opportunity, and for the committee’s timely focus on this vital issue of child protection. As special rapporteur, a key focus of my role is ensuring that children’s rights principles are embedded in legislative and policy frameworks to ensure Ireland meets its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC, and Article 42A.1 of the Constitution with respect to child protection.
An Taoiseach began his current term with an ambitious vision: to make Ireland the “best country in Europe to be a child,” echoing the language of the Government’s August 2019 children and youth policy, which states: “The Government aims to improve outcomes for children and young people and make Ireland one of the best countries in which to grow up and raise a family.” I acknowledge at the outset that there have been a number of recent significant steps taken in respect of child protection, which indicate the Government’s commitment to that vision. In particular, I highlight three recent developments, namely the establishment of the child poverty and well-being programme office in the Department of An Taoiseach, and publication of its initial programme plan for 2023 to 2025; and commencement of the process of reform, albeit long overdue, of the statutory framework concerning child welfare and child protection through both the Child Care (Amendment) Act 2022 and the progression of the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2023. As I indicated in my written submission to the committee regarding the general scheme of the Bill, I welcome and support the Government’s commitment to reform child care and child protection law, and to deliver more child-centred legislation. Of course there are a number of outstanding matters to be resolved. The third item I welcome is the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, the new Coimisiún na Meán and its significant powers.
While acknowledging that these steps are meaningful and important, and welcoming An Taoiseach’s ambitious vision, there are persisting significant and grave concerns regarding child protection in a range of areas. In my view, there is a realisation gap. While there is an undoubted respect for and commitment to children’s rights in principle, which is to be commended and welcomed, in practice there remain significant difficulties, resulting in children being at risk. I commenced my role in February 2023. At the time, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child was in the process of publishing its concluding observations on the combined fifth and sixth periodic reports of Ireland. The concluding observations raise a very wide range of serious concerns, spanning diverse issues, and make clear that detailed, extensive cross-sector reform is required to give effect to the UNCRC. They highlight six particular areas in which the committee said urgent measures must be taken by Ireland. They are non-discrimination, violence against children, mental health, standard of living, education and child justice. It is a wide range of issues. Each of those is in turn broken down by the UN committee into a lengthy list of measures that it says need to be urgently addressed along with other matters it says need to be addressed but are not as urgent. The scale and depth of the problems laid bare by the UN committee is extensive and should not be underestimated. It is clear that there is substantial work to be done for Ireland to meet its international legal obligations, and this must be done urgently. Key questions for the Government are whether and, if so, when, it will implement those urgent measures identified as necessary by the UN committee at the start of this year.
For my part tonight, I wish to draw to the members’ attention six topics which I consider to be particularly pressing in respect of child protection in Ireland at present. I did hear some of the previous session and I have views and thoughts on many of the issues which arose, which I hope will also come up in discussion. There are six topics I wanted to outline at the outset. Each of these, of course, raises general, systemic concerns. I do not doubt for a moment the commitment and expertise of many of the professionals involved in those systems. I want to make that clear.
The first of the six items I wish to highlight is mental health services, CAMHS. It is impossible not to focus on the crisis in child and adolescent mental health services, as I appreciate many of the committee members have been doing. It is one of the urgent topics identified by the UN committee and now laid bare in the findings of mental health services inspector, Dr. Susan Finnerty, in her recent final report. She has identified “ongoing and serious deficits” in Ireland’s mental health services for children and young people, increasing the risk to them. Her findings are wide-ranging, including severe understaffing with the vast majority of teams across the country being significantly below recommended staffing levels. She found also that care planning for some children was either non-existent or of such poor quality as to be effectively meaningless and tokenistic. She also found that CAMHS does not have a proper IT system for monitoring patients. In contrast to that language from An Taoiseach about wanting to be the best in Europe, she said at the launch of the report, that Ireland is “amongst the worst in the world for IT infrastructure in youth mental health services". This is a key child protection issue, and extremely pressing. The root and branch reform Dr Finnerty has identified is critical. Resourcing is plainly a key issue, as the final report identified and as other stakeholders have made clear, and as many children and young people, and their families, know all too well given lengthy waiting lists. Some children wait up to two years for an appointment. One liaison psychiatrist in CAMHS in Dublin responded to the report in a piece reported in The Irish Times. I refer to Professor Elizabeth Barrett. Her quote is telling. She said: “funding levels are really, really low so I think we should ask ourselves if we’re taking ourselves seriously. There’s a lot of political discussion but the funding levels remain low.”
The second item I wish to highlight is the letter of retired District Court Judge Simms of May 2023, recently published by the Child Law Project, in which he expressed his utmost concern for children in the care of the State. He described being informed in court over the past year by Tusla and its lawyers that the system is in a state of unprecedented crisis. He highlighted staffing and retention shortages; and the lack of properly regulated suitable placements for foster care, residential placements and special secure care. He also noted difficulties with interagency communication. He called for co-ordinated, immediate action to address those failures, not a silo but co-ordinated interagency response. That lack of suitable placements has again been an issue this month. I wish to draw to the committee's attention a recent, distressing example that should be considered, dating from 4 September 2023, when the President of the High Court, Mr Justice David Barniville, ordered “with a heavy heart” that a chronically suicidal 16-year-old girl now attempting to take her life on a near daily basis must remain in an inappropriate placement, in a psychiatric unit, as a special care place has not so far been allocated to her.
It was reported that the court was told that staff interventions are keeping the girl alive, but the situation sometimes requires up to six staff to restrain her suicide attempts. The president’s reported remarks in the hearing are important in respect of the realisation gap between children’s rights in principle and children's rights in practice to which I have referred. He queried why Ireland is a country with not enough places for these children “while awash with money in other areas.”
The third issue to highlight is child sexual exploitation, CSE. Reference was made in the earlier session to University College Dublin's, UCD’s, sexual exploitation research programme, SERP, and its findings in June 2023, which were deeply concerning, about the extent of organised child sexual exploitation in Ireland. Of course, many of the SERP findings echoed findings made in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, IICSA, in England and Wales, that is, the investigation into CSE by organised networks, which reported in February 2022. There is a particularly grave concern regarding the safety of children and young people, especially girls, in residential care or who go missing while in State care, who are being targeted for sexual exploitation in an organised manner by co-ordinated networks or gangs of predatory men. SERP identified a concern that CSE is hidden as people in authority are not recognising or understanding the risks and signs, and there are barriers to reporting. I recognise that efforts are being made by Tusla and An Garda Síochána to address those challenges in a number of ways. However, I support SERP’s call for targeted nationwide action in the form of a national policy on protecting children from sexual exploitation for which the Department would hold responsibility.
The fourth issue is child trafficking and information gaps. Last week, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, as independent rapporteur on trafficking, published its second evaluation of the implementation of the EU anti-trafficking directive. Of particular concern to me and I hope to this committee are the figures concerning child victims of trafficking. Those figures show that no child victims whatsoever were identified in Ireland in 2020. No child victims were identified whatsoever in 2021 and in 2022, only five child victims were identified. In total, that is only five children identified over the past three years. IHREC reports that the majority of those five children were trafficked for sexual exploitation. Those statistics mean that children represent only 8% of all identified trafficking victims in Ireland, which is significantly below the EU average of 23%. I am concerned that both the very low absolute figure of five children in three years and that percentage of 8% of all victims suggests that, first, there is significant under-identification of child victims of trafficking in Ireland and, second, there is likely to be disproportionate under-identification of child victims in comparison to adult victims. That is a serious child protection concern. Going back to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, it identified and highlighted at the start of this year information gathering gaps as a particular child protection concern.
I am conscious that these are long issues, but I will deal briefly wit the fifth and sixth issues. The fifth issue concerns separated children and accompanied minors. Of course, Tusla’s report for 2022 makes clear that the agency has faced a significant increase in separated or unaccompanied children requiring accommodation and services. A number of factors have contributed to that, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a number of other matters to which other witnesses have referred.
Coinciding with this increasing demand for Tusla's services have been a number of child protection concerns, which were raised in those recent HIQA inspection reports and recent press reports regarding a Tusla internal report dating from March 2023 that found that there is a lack of oversight in Tusla’s management of reports to gardaí of suspected abuse of unaccompanied minors in State care from Ukraine and other countries seeking asylum. Tusla in that internal report said it could not be assured it was notifying gardaí in a timely manner of suspected sexual or physical abuse of child refugees and asylum seekers in its care. Again, that report identified insufficient resources as one aspect of the failures.
The sixth and final issue I want to highlight at the outset is child poverty. Child poverty is a child protection issue. It is endemic in Ireland. The most recent Survey of Income and Living Conditions revealed that child poverty is increasing. The number of children experiencing enforced deprivation rose to 236,000 last year from 202,000, and there was a sharp increase in the number of children living in consistent poverty, up by more than 40% in just one year to more than 89,000 children.
Last week was End Child Poverty Week. Marking the week, the Children’s Rights Alliance called for budget 2024 to be a children’s budget, designed to break the cycle of poverty affecting children, young people and families across the country. It specifically called for a 10% increase to Tusla funding in the budget. Its chief executive, Ms Tanya Ward, said: "Our services are at breaking point. We are witnessing a massive demand surge in child protection, welfare and family support services ... [and there is] unmet need."
In conclusion, it seems to me that those six issues identify just how far Ireland has to go to achieve an Taoiseach’s ambition to make Ireland the greatest place in Europe to be a child. While I welcome the changes that have taken place and the fact that there is a clear commitment within Government to address child protection issues, it seems to me that the gap between that laudable principle and the reality in practice is a large and troubling one. I respectfully request that the committee considers carefully that vital question of resources. Funding and staffing shortfalls are at the heart of all six issues I have summarised. Tusla’s 2022 annual report documented an increase both in the number of referrals for the child protection and welfare services, which is a 13% rise since the year before, and the complex needs of individuals and families referred to services, which were points made by the Minister in outline in the first session. I recognise that Tusla has been facing a combination of challenging issues, but there has not been a proportionate increase to Tusla’s funding or resource allocation during the time of this increased referral to meet the increased demand. That is at the heart of the Children’s Rights Alliance call for a children’s budget in 2024, and in my view it has much to commend it.
Finally, I note also that allocation of resources was an issue of concern to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its concluding observations at the start of the year. It expressly recommended that Ireland “incorporate a child rights-based approach into the State budgeting process”, and I agree. Incorporation of the committee includes duties on child rights-based budgeting. Article 4 incorporates a duty on states to use their “maximum available resources” to realise child rights. Ireland is one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Last year, Ireland’s economy was the fastest growing in Europe. Speaking frankly, we owe it to the children of Ireland, particularly very vulnerable groups and those groups affected by the intersectionality, which was referred to earlier. We are duty-bound under Article 4 of the UNCRC, and we owe it to those children to commit greater funding and resources to rapidly and urgently improve our struggling child protection systems and services.
