Guardianship of Infants and Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-24 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel I also welcome this Bill. It is important legislation that will see the partner of a person who murders, kills or seriously injures another parent of his or her child either lose or have his or her guardianship rights restricted, which is absolutely called for. I acknowledge David French for his advocacy on this issue and welcome him and his sister, Veronica, into the Chamber today. There are so many cases like Valerie's where children have been bereaved. He is right; it is abuse of children. I am concerned about the time between a crime being committed and sentencing, which can sometimes be considerable. It can take up to a year for a case to come to court. Children are already being abused. It is quite common that children will already have been subjected to serious abuse or witnessed abuse within the home for many years, leading up to the murder of their parent. Then, we have a time-lapse between when the crime was carried out and the sentencing. What is the situation there? It is an interim period. Children are grieving for the loss of their parent and if the perpetrator of the crime is out on bail, which will often not be the case because it is such a serious offence, are the children left in the custody of that parent? We need to better hear the voice of the child. We need to have experts who recognise and can understand children because we know children can be pressured, coerced or even, from fear, say something that is not what they actually feel. I talk to parents all the time who have separated from their partner because of violence, yet there is a court order for access to the children. The children are crying. They do not want to go to see, in most cases, the father. If the mother does not compel them to go and she does not want to because they are fearful and in tears, she is the one in breach of a court order. There needs to be a better understanding of the rights of the child here. If children do not want access to one of their parents because of what they witnessed in the home, then they need to be listened to. Take into account that coercion and pressure can be put on children to say one thing. When we have experts in the field, they should be able to interpret that. The Bill provides that Tusla be given the responsibility to apply for this order within six months of the conviction but Tusla, as we know, is not properly resourced as it is. It is under pressure to meet demands and people are falling through the cracks. We have children being left for far too long in the care of families where they have been abused or neglected. We have an insufficient number of foster families. We need far more. We have ended up with children being put into precarious care arrangements. We also have a lack of aftercare support, and I have come across several people who have left the foster care situation and are not receiving the support they require to navigate their lives. One in five complaints that the Ombudsman for Children's office received were about Tusla. I am not running down Tusla. I am just saying it is an under-resourced organisation and if we are giving Tusla even more powers and responsibilities to act in these situations, then it needs the resources to enable it to do so within the six months in a timely fashion. When a person is convicted of the manslaughter of his or her partner but was acting in self-defence, where domestic violence has been prevalent for many years, that should be taken into account. Such parents may have lost their lives defending themselves and their children from a violent situation, so they should not be subjected to this. I acknowledge that John O'Dowd, my colleague in the North, is introducing similar legislation, so we will have an island-led approach to this. --- 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