Cash-strapped Child and Family Agency still dealing with "unsustainable" legal spend

The new Child and Family Agency needs more money to fulfil its brief and is being weighed down by "unsustainable" legal spending, including historical court bills.

Chief executive of Tusla, Gordon Jeyes, told the Joint Committee on Health and Children the budget provided to Tusla was “inflexible” and “we are doing ok in the circumstances”, but there was no desire to settle for that level of performance.

He said there was “inconsistent” funding in some areas, adding: “children suffer where there are gaps”.

Huge spending on legal cases is one of the reasons Tusla has voiced concerns over its budget. Tusla executive manager, Eibhlín Byrne, told the committee “the current system in which we operate is broken, and increasingly adversarial”.

Last year, €34m was spent on legal services and costs, but the budget allocated for same was just €17m. Ms Byrne said that to June this year, €6.2m had been spent on solicitors and €934,000 had been spent on counsel representation in cases.

Both she and Gordon Jeyes stressed that steps have been taken to reduce legal spend, such as drastically reducing the number of legal service users from 1,000 to fewer than 100, restricting the use of counsels in the district court and increasing competition among solicitors. Senior counsel has been used in 25 cases to June this year, and junior counsel in 50 cases.

However, Mr Jeyes said the level of legal spending was still “unsustainable”, and Ms Byrne said the Guardian Ad Litem system — providing a legal voice for children in court proceedings — needed to be regulated and overhauled.

To June GAL costs such as travel and fees stood at €3m, with another €2.69m added for their solicitors’ fees and a further €501,000 for SC fees.

“Very often GALS are calling on solicitors and barristers, sometimes in tricky cases, sometimes not,” Ms Byrne said. “It is a broken system, in fact the entire legal system needs to be overhauled.”

She said greater use of mediation would be better for children and families and added that while Tusla pays the GAL expenses, “we do not have oversight”.

The committee also heard that as of July there were 9,000 cases which had not been allocated a social worker, but Tusla’s chief operations officer, Fred McBride, stressed that while 3,000 of those were described as high priority, “that is not the same thing as saying they are at risk, [we are] acknowledging that they need a social worker. Where we determine that risk is immediate or high we deal with it immediately.”

Mr Jeyes said Tusla had made positive changes to the system, including the covering of maternity leave posts and the agency’s Child Protection Notification System, to which both the health service and gardaí will have full 24/7 access. There has also been a full review of sexual, gender and domestic-based violence services this year, with a roadmap for those services to be defined in the near future.

However, Ms Byrne told the committee that existing services were, at best, “inconsistent or sporadic”, with some refuge beds available to victims of domestic abuse and homeless people.

Mr McBride said of the 1,600 care-leavers, last July just four were found to have entered homeless hostel accommodation, and so far this year just one child in care is regarded as missing.