I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber and thank her for being here. I acknowledge the good work and intervention by the Minister, Deputy Foley, last week in relation to an issue in Tipperary with St. Bernard's therapeutic fostering support service, which provides foster care support across counties Tipperary, Kilkenny and Carlow. Tusla, because of the Minister's intervention, has agreed to continue that service for 2026.
This is a service that is critical and extremely important in the area. While the decision to retain St. Bernard's therapeutic fostering support service for 2026 is very welcome, the underlying issues have not gone away.
I met Róisín Stewart and Andrew Kennedy in St. Bernard's this week and Tusla has informed them it is its intention to move towards a standardised model from 2027. Tusla staff will engage with St. Bernard's to learn its approach and attempt to replicate it elsewhere but a therapeutic service built on relationships, trust and independence cannot simply be replicated through observation. The model used by St. Bernard’s is unique in that it prioritises continuity of care. Children and foster carers are supported by professionals who know them well, understand their history and have built trust over many years. In some cases, these relationships has been in place for over a decade.
Tusla’s own standards emphasise stability and relationship-based care. The concern is that moving to a more standardised model risks replacing that continuity with a more transactional service where families engage with whoever is available rather than someone they trust. For children who have already experienced instability, losing that consistent therapeutic relationship is not a small change but a significant disruption. The high staff retention within St. Bernard’s is not incidental; it is what allows those relationships to develop over time. That level of continuity is extremely difficult to replicate in large centralised systems with higher staff turnover.
Tusla’s own foster care standards emphasise the need to support carers and maintain stability for children. The question here is whether an internal, standardised model can genuinely provide the same level of support and trust because for many of these children St. Bernard’s is not just a service but their person, their safe place, their constant. Removing that is not a neutral change. If a service is contributing to placement stability removing it without clear evidence of an equal replacement risks undermining one of Tusla’s core objectives. In addition, moving the service to north Cork raises access issues. For someone in my hometown of Clonmel who perhaps gets a bus to St. Bernard’s in Fethard, access will become a significant challenge. The service is working and is trusted. It is retaining placements. Removing it is incredibly risky and not a decision Tusla should take without offering a very clearly superior service in its place.
There are so many who have gone through the service. One child, who I will not name, wrote to me asking me to read out his experience of the service. It will only take 20 seconds or so. He said he came into foster care when he was six days old and was finally adopted in September 2021. The adoption process took four years and nine months. At the start of his adoption his parents did the therapeutic fostering service course and he said he is so lucky he got Samantha O’Doherty as his therapeutic support worker from St. Bernard’s. She was amazing. At the time he had a social worker who did not listen to him or have his best interests at heart. Samantha was the only person at the time who was working with him who cared about what he had to say and what he wanted. She was one of the only professionals he had over the years who cared for him and fully trusted him. Every Monday after school she would come to his house to make stuff with him and to talk with him. He says she helped him so much through a space and time in his life when he was old enough to know what he wanted but not old enough to go and speak to a judge about it. Samantha also came to the Adoption Authority of Ireland with him. He thinks this service from St. Bernard’s helped him a lot and he would not want it to close because just that one worker helped him so much throughout his time in care, so imagine what 15 per county would do.
That is a young guy who is 16 and has been going through the St. Bernard’s service, as his carers have been, for a decade. It is one example of many I am aware of that show this service is so vital for the area.