No parent can rest easy about Tusla’s unquestionable power

The apparently arbitrary power vested in the State’s child protection agency to take our children away from us is compounded by its power to review its own decisions, writes Margaret Hickey

It is almost like a throwback to a much discredited era where the prevailing ideology decided in its arrogance what was and was not a suitable milieu to raise a child. Time was when children were torn from their unmarried mothers — with family consent as often as not — because they were considered unfit to provide for their child.

The emotional violence visited on both mothers and children in our not-so-distant past is now rightly repudiated. But thinking has changed. Instead of breaking up families in difficulty, we support them. How ironic then that, in our more enlightened age, a whole new set of social arbiters can remove a child from the loving care of his natural family.