Child and Family Agency
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-19
============================================================

Claire Kerrane (SF), Roscommon-Galway

It is really alarming to hear that four children in the State need a special care bed but there is not one there for them. I appreciate, understand and welcome the change to the payscale made in 2024 but we need to look at that again to see whether it is enough in the context of recruitment and retention of staff. I have raised with the Minister previously the report of the external review group on special care which raises the same issues around staffing and capacity. That report, published in April 2025, identified that since 2021 a total of 168 staff had been hired but 134 had left. There is capacity for 26 beds across the three special care units but I gather from what the Minister is saying that we only have staff for 15 of those 26 beds. We have four extremely vulnerable children who have no bed, so we need to look at the pay scale again. We need to look at that external report again and at the recommendations within it.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-19