Child and Family Agency
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-12
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Aidan Farrelly (SD), Kildare North

I want to stay focused. I thank the Minister for providing some information regarding the costs. That works out at approximately €76 per child. If we are looking at 42,000 children, that is what has been allocated. Will each child be spoken to or will a member of their family be spoken to? Kate Duggan told us in committee that the first phase of this will be an automated check to see if children are enrolled in school or services. Is that it? Is that when we deem that the welfare of a child is okay? Given that 100,000 children will be referred to Tusla this year, is it not fair to say that it is a knee-jerk reaction to ask Tusla to conduct a review of 42,000 children? What happens if 1% of those children need follow-on services? Never mind 10%; if the figure is 1%, that is 4,500 children. The organisation is not in a position to offer any sort of follow-up services because it is already working with a huge number of children and young people in crisis. This week I asked Tusla to provide the details of how many children and young people are in its care that it cannot verify the age of. The organisation could not tell me what those statistics are. That is an area of Tusla that needs resourcing. My real concern, from a place of real sincerity, is that what we are calling a welfare check will not be one. We will not know about the welfare of these children and young people. We might know they are there. We might know that they exist, but that simply is not enough. If we are going to do it, we need to do it meaningfully. We need to accept it is not going to be done by March. If we do this right, chances are it would not even be done by March of the following year. If the Minister is going to do this, I implore her to do it right.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-12