Fergus Finlay: We can afford the best protection system in the world — but we are still failing children
There are degrees of risk involved for the children, from slight risk to grave. And everybody knows that where there is a delay in getting to the children, the risk grows. File picture
The noughties, it was called. The decade between 2000 and 2010. In that decade 200 children, known to our State to be at risk, died.
It’s not how we remember the noughties, of course. Just before the start of the decade, the term Celtic Tiger was coined. Some saw it as a great phrase to capture Ireland’s economic miracle, others as a catchy description of greed and waste.
It was the decade when Polish and other East European workers came here to build houses and housing estates for the rest of us.
Banks were shovelling out money to anyone who wanted to build — not just 100% mortgages, but a few bob in addition for the extras — water features for the garden, a second car for the drive, that sort of thing.
We probably knew in our hearts that it couldn’t last, because this was an economic miracle that turned the basic law of supply and demand on its head. A building boom fuelled by cheap money led to the result that the more houses we built, the more expensive they became.
But hey, we all thought. Tomorrow will never come. Today it’s time for a party.
And all the while, children were dying. In the care system, or known to the HSE to be at risk. Just under 200 children and young people. Thirteen of those children died by hanging, one from a gunshot wound. 11 of the deaths were drug related, and 11 more were involved in fatal road accidents.
Strangely, a huge number of obviously very young children — 28 — were reported as having died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
When the headline figure first appeared in a couple of newspaper headlines, it was dismissed as scare-mongering fiction. But when a short time later an official report confirmed the essential accuracy of the numbers, there could be no denying it any more.
That report, called , was written by Geoffrey Shannon and my former colleague, the extraordinary Norah Gibbons. It confirmed beyond doubt that almost 200 children and young people had been grievously failed by the State while we were partying.
Earlier, Norah had chaired an enquiry into what became known as the Roscommon Case, a story in which six young people were terribly abused by their parents (both of whom ended up in jail), while the HSE found themselves unable to intervene for a variety of spurious reasons.
These cases, and others, proved one thing to the government of the day. The HSE was an organisation that ran between 50 and 60 public hospitals and was also supposed to provide an enormous range of community services.
In the middle of all that sprawling empire, vulnerable children were completely lost. Terrible things were always going to happen on their watch, and they didn’t have the structures or the focus to do anything proactive. They weren’t even much good at picking up the pieces after awful damage had been done.
So it was decided around 10 or 11 years ago that the vital task of child protection would be taken away from the HSE entirely and entrusted to a new and dedicated agency. Tusla would have one responsibility and one responsibility only. To keep our children safe.
I was one of the people who campaigned hard to get Tusla established. In its early years, it was deprived of the start-up budget it needed, and had to get involved in territorial battles with the HSE over things like computer services.
More to the point, it was supposed to have its own team of child psychologists, and a core group of community nurses who specialised in the needs of children, and who would have been the perfect early warning system in any situation of neglect or abuse. Those things never happened.
Nevertheless, I frequently defended Tusla from attack, to the point where I was sometimes accused of working for an organisation that was in the pay of Tusla. That never influenced me, but frequent contact with very hard-working social workers did.
I knew they had caseloads that were unmanageable, and I knew the stress they lived with every day. I knew the work was grinding and unrelenting.
And there has never been a year since Tusla was established that demand did not go up. According to their most recently published annual report there were almost 97,000 referrals to Tusla in 2024. That number is at least 5% higher now, because it is going up 5% every year.
All told, it has more than doubled since Tusla was founded. There are degrees of risk involved for the children, from slight risk to grave. And everybody knows that where there is a delay in getting to the children, the risk grows.
The economic calamity that befell us when the noughties crashed into recession increased the risk — so did covid. As risk increased within families, the resources available to Tusla got more and more tightly squeezed.
Which is where, at the end of the day, Special Emergency Arrangements (SEAs) come in. I confess I had never heard of them until I watched the important Prime Time Investigates programme on children in care the other night.
These SEAs are arrangements with private, for-profit organisations to take care of children that the system within Túsla cannot cope with. They are almost entirely unregulated, uninspected, unwatched.
And my goodness are they expensive. revealed that the cost of placing a child in one of these utterly unregulated places was €14,000 a year. The profits, no doubt, are considerable.
Tusla’s latest annual report reveals that they paid (by my count) nearly 130 different organisations nearly €300 million in 2024 alone. While some of the entities involved were paid tiny amounts, nearly half of them were paid over a million, and the “top ten” pocketed tens of millions between them.
And, as Prime Time revealed, those tens of millions were not paid to protect children, to keep them safe and out of harm's way, to ensure that they had a decent crack at education.
These children are being warehoused. It is certain that some of them will come to harm — as a direct result of the tens of millions being spent on the warehousing operation.
This isn’t just a public policy failure. It is a scandalous risk being taken by the State with children’s lives. I know I’ll be criticised again for pointing out that Tusla’s budget has never kept pace with increasing demand.
One frightening statistic has almost never changed. If we wanted to match the UK in terms of the number of social workers, we’d need to recruit 1,500. As things stand, Irish social workers in the field of child protection have caseloads that are three times greater than most of their counterparts.
Of course, they’re failing. How can it be otherwise? And that’s happening in one of the richest countries in the world.
We can easily afford to ensure that our children have the best child protection system in the world. That would be something to be proud of. It would certainly be better than the shame our current failure causes.
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