Guardianship of Infants and Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-24 ============================================================ Sharon Keogan (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel The Minister is welcome to the Chamber. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I approach the Bill with a great degree of caution and circumspection, as it warrants. I have substantial personal experience in helping children from troubled homes and situations. I recognise the great difficulty and complexity that comes with such issues, especially in how we legislate on them. In this case, there are a number of tensions that merit consideration as it progresses to Committee Stage. First is the role of the wider family, particularly kinship care. As a State, we should look to models that recognise children are best supported, where possible, within their extended family networks. Grandparents and relatives often provide stability in the most difficult cases. Under this Bill, even where a child is being cared for by grandparents or close relatives, those carers cannot initiate or trigger an application for guardianship. It appears they are entirely dependent on Tusla choosing to act. This means the people most directly responsible for the child's day-to-day welfare will often have no formal role in the legal process governing the child's future. That creates a clear disconnect. I would like to see greater support for kinship care. Law should reflect it not by displacing the State but by recognising that those closest to the child may have a legitimate role in protecting them. There is scope to consider a more balanced model that allows some structured role for family members. Second is the constitutional dimension. The Bill allows for restriction and, in some cases, removal of guardianship. That is understandable but even in the most extreme cases the individual remains the parent of the child. A criminal conviction does not dissolve that relationship. It does not dissolve the unconditional love that child has for that parent, despite the most heinous crime that parent may have done. Our constitutional framework treats the parent-child relationship with particular weight. We are not simply removing administrative rights; we are intervening in one of the most fundamental legal relationships we recognise. In some cases, circumstances may change, convictions may be overturned and children as they grow may form their own views about contact. The safeguards in the Bill are important but there is room to further ground the legislation in proportionality and to check its constitutionality, ensuring we protect children while still recognising the enduring nature of that relationship. Third is the role of Tusla. As drafted, Tusla is effectively the gatekeeper. The process begins only if the agency acts. In some cases, it depends on a reasonable cause threshold; in others, it is simply that the agency considers it appropriate. If Tusla does not act, the legislation is never triggered. That is a significant concentration of power and must be viewed in light of current realities. Public confidence in Tusla is not where it needs to be. That is reflected in a number of serious, well-documented cases. We have seen, for example, the murder of the poor Ukrainian boy under Tusla care and the case in Citywest where the ten-year-old victim of the alleged sexual assault had been missing from Tusla supervision for over 24 hours. We have seen repeated judicial criticisms and findings that Tusla failed to comply with hundreds of court directions affecting hundreds of children. A High Court description of its approach to court orders is "wholly unsatisfactory". A District Court found its conduct was "shocking and appalling", including cases where children were left without allocated social workers, despite court orders. These are not abstract concerns; these are findings from our courts about the performance of the body to which the Bill assigns decisive gatekeeping power. This is not about individual social workers either, who often work under immense pressure but it raises a legitimate question: is it appropriate to place such a high level of discretion in a single agency without additional safeguards, balance or alternative pathways? If the intention is that these serious concerns should come before the courts, then we should be cautious about a system where the outcome depends entirely on an internal decision within Tusla. For that reason, I intend to table amendments on Committee Stage to look at these issues. If we are serious about protecting children, the system must be robust not only in principle but in practice. We must ensure no single point of failure can prevent the law operating as intended. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-24