Structural Reform of Child Welfare Governance: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19 ============================================================ Ken O'Flynn (II), Cork North-Central I thank the Minister of State for her reply. I am rather disappointed that the senior Minister did not stay in the room for the rest of the debate but left early. I am also disappointed that we had no speakers from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in the House. One would think that children's safety would be the most important thing on the mind of any elected representative. I thank colleagues from Sinn Féin for their support. I am also grateful for the support that came from the Labour Party and the Social Democrats, although we may have different thoughts on some aspects. I would suggest that if people did have problems with our motion or disagreed with it, they had the opportunity to put down amendments. I do not see any amendments coming from the Social Democrats at this particular time. The Minister of State spoke about statistics and gave some lovely figures. I know she admitted that she was not here for the whole debate but as the senior Minister seems to have wandered back to Plato's cave, I want to add these statistics to the debate. Over 4,000 children are waiting for social workers, with ongoing criticism from the courts. In 2025, one judge describing it as appalling and shocking that 250 children were not allocated social workers Tusla having been ordered to do so by the courts. Other issues include unvetted care workers in services in 2024. Whistleblowers have claimed that unvetted staff are working in private firms. We have the failure to provide care places from 2023 to 2025. Repeated criticism from the High Court and the Supreme Court has been levelled at Tusla. The Department of Children, Disablity and Equality accused Tusla of insufficient responses leading to a crisis. There have been high-profile cases involving missing children and scandals in 2025 and 2026. I will not mention names because I do not think it is right to mention the children's names but over €3 million in reviews has been spent in 42,000 cases. That seems absolutely astonishing to me. We have children dying who have been under the care of or highlighted to Tusla. A total of 235 children known to Tusla have died. Let us think about that - 235 children known to Tusla have died and the Government is still saying that Tusla is fit for purpose, there is nothing wrong, look the other way, it is grand, it is fine, there is no problem here lads. As I said, the Minister and this Government have to be living in Plato's cave. They are using Tusla as a scapegoat because they do not want to take on the responsibility themselves. They do not want to put up their hands and say, "Yes, we're taking on the responsibility. There's a Minister in charge." The Minister says she is in charge but any time you write to a Minister about a problem with Tusla, he or she will redirect you right to the chairperson. Any time you speak to the Department of Justice, Migration and Home Affairs about An Garda Síochána, you are told, "Write to the Commissioner, nothing to do with us, nothing to see here." What is the Government actually in charge of anymore? It has outsourced the problems because Ministers want to hang on to their seats, do not want to be criticised and want to be able to come into this House when a national scandal breaks and something in this country goes wrong and be able to say, "Nothing to do with the Government; that's an agency outside the Government's remit." When they want to hang their heads in shame, say lessons must be learned and wring their hands in here, they will do that no problem. A number of weeks ago, adults who were children of industrial schools were in this House and what do we do? We had to issue an apology. The Government is very good at issuing apologies but instead of trying to look good, why do we not do something good? Why not be honest with ourselves and with the public? I have listened to people in this House. The fact that no Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael person was here might be because they are not getting calls any more from their constituents. Maybe they just do not know what is going on in the country any more. Maybe they are so lost in the bubble that is Leinster House that they do not realise that people are picking up the phones to Opposition TDs, be they Sinn Féin, Independent Ireland, Labour or the Social Democrats, and telling them the truth about what is going on. About ten minutes before I came into this Chamber, a social worker was crying on the phone to me. I will give an example of something that is going on at the moment. We talk about how good this organisation is and the Comptroller and Auditor General. In one Tusla office in Cork, five years prior to a scandal breaking and a Garda investigation, the Comptroller and Auditor General flagged with Tusla the fact that thousands of euro were not being accounted for. It took Tusla three years to put in a procedure. At that time, €50,000 was the average of what was given out in pocket money where no book was there, nothing was assigned, there was not one document and there was not even an initial on it. It took Tusla three years to work it out and say, "Lads, we have to be realistic here. We should have a ledger saying how much cash is coming out to the safe." It was amazing that when that happened, it was reduced to €6,000 that was signed for the following year and the year after. That is how much pocket money there was - not the €50,000 for the past three years. When people are saying here that everything is fine and everything is dandy and rosy in the garden, we know it is not. I accept that this motion may have flaws but at least we are having the conversations and are telling people we are not satisfied with what is going on in this country. I have said repeatedly in this House that children are the most valuable thing we have. They are our future, are vulnerable and need to be protected. The Minister of State is coming along with flowery language saying everything is fine and that we are allocating this amount of money and that amount of money yet there are figures here that tell a very different story. The most recent story, which we all know, involved a ten-year-old child and the word "absconded" was used. I do not know how a ten-year-old with special needs absconds and ends up being allegedly sexually abused. That is the reality of this country We will all hang our heads in shame and say it is awful and terrible, we should learn from this mistake and it must never happen again but what do we do? We go out and we repeat the mistake over and over again one after another and then what do we do? We throw more money at it. It is a case of, "Don't look at it, it's fine, we'll have another committee and we'll put in another layer here and another layer there and we'll have a committee after this and we'll put more money into it" and we will not solve the real problems because the real problems might be just a bit more difficult to talk about. It might be a bit more difficult to do and it just proves one thing - that children do not matter to this State. --- 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/2026-03-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-19