The Irish Independent carried this story on its front page on Thursday: Nearly 200 asylum seekers placed in Tusla care were later found to be adults.
The Independent reported that some 192 adult asylum seekers were placed in Tusla children’s accommodation over the last three years before it was later discovered that they were over 18.
Meanwhile, the number of immigrants who applied for international protection as minors but were subsequently deemed “ineligible” because of their age has more than doubled since 2023. The figures were released to Sinn Fein’s migration spokesperson, Matt Carthy TD, who told the newspaper that children in State care need to be protected.
It has prompted Sinn Fein, the notorious flip-floppers on immigration policy, to call for “changes to the system to protect children.” The party’s position – which has gone from Mary Lou promising that it “would not put an upper limit” on the number of refugees coming into the State, to now blasting the Government’s handling of immigration as a failure and a disaster, highlights rank hypocrisy. Still, Matt Carthy has now secured figures on the issue of asylum seekers pretending to be children, and I think that must be welcomed.
This is because there has been an insistence since 2023 when this issue began rearing its head in the press, that there were “no exact figures” on asylum seekers faking it, and claiming to be kids. We now know, appallingly, that the Government has effectively been placing adult migrant men into Tusla care facilities alongside vulnerable kids. That should be a national scandal.
On The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk in August 2024, Irish Times journalist Jack Power said the number of adults pretending to be unaccompanied minors is likely to be “quite small.” At the time, the journalist said that tens of thousands of asylum seekers have come to Ireland in recent years and only a small proportion of them have been unaccompanied children.
Sinn Fein is now saying what is obvious, and has been obvious for a long time: that a more robust system is needed to protect children in state accommodation, amid confusion over which agency is responsible for age verification. Can we finally say such common sense things without being attacked and labelled far-right?
“There naturally needs to be protection for everybody who claims to be a minor, but we also need to protect the children who are in state care who are minors,” Carthy said.
All of this comes after a man who was charged with the murder of Ukrainian teenager Vadym Davydenko (17) in October at a Tusla facility for separated minors seeking international protection. Davydenko had been in Ireland a mere four days when he was brutally killed at the juvenile accommodation centre.
At the time, it was widely reported that the suspected Somalian perpetrator was a teenager. When the story hit international headlines, the BBC wrote that “a 17-year-old teenager had been charged with the murder of another boy at an emergency accommodation centre in north Dublin.”
Now, it is understood the suspect was not a boy, but was a grown man all along. Gardaí say he may not have been entitled to Tusla care at the time, and should never have been in the facility, operated by the State’s child and family agency, in the first place. Left-leaning activists and politicians often talk about compassion and goodness and Ireland’s wonderful welcome, but we need to get real about the reality of a system which meant that a teenager was safer off in a war zone than on Irish soil.
The whole thing is an unmitigated fiasco. The State has spent €1.2 billion a year of our taxes funding runaway IPAS dysfunction. People should see that as absolutely criminal.
In the last number of weeks, the Irish people have had to sit back whilst the most horrendous situations involving the IPAS charade make national news, and nobody is held responsible. Aside from the brutal stabbing of the Ukrainian teen in a Tusla-run accommodation centre, there was also the 10-year-old girl who was allegedly the victim of an alleged sexual assault, carried out on the grounds of Citywest. The suspect is a 26-year-old asylum seeker who cannot be named due to the nature of the charges. Those two cases mentioned above both involve children who were in Tusla care.
The specific issue of asylum seekers pretending to be children has long been an issue. But there remains great confusion within the Department of Justice and Tusla regarding who id actually legally responsible in respect of carrying out age verification for unaccompanied minors in IPAS settings – this has left a vacuum whereby many ‘minors’ are not minors at all.
The Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee heard last month that none of the officials representing the Department of Justice could clarify as a matter of law who exactly is responsible, while it was made clear to members on the committee that it was Tusla’s responsibility. The reality, that committee heard, is that the statutory responsibility for carrying out age verification is an obligation of the International Protection Office, that, as a “matter of practice, was transferred to Tusla, it seems, for a number of years.”
But Tusla, as we know, are not coping at all with the number of undocumented minors arriving here. The service, according to Tusla’s chief executive Kate Dugan, has seen a whopping 500 per cent increase in the number of unaccompanied minors coming to Ireland since 2022.”
“We continue to engage with the Department of Justice in relation to the implementation of the EU Migration Pact with particular focus on proposed revised processes for age assessment and the establishment of a Representative service for unaccompanied minors,” Dugan said.
The Dáil previously heard that since 2021, 121 children in Tusla’s care have been referred to Gardaí for sexual abuse, something which has been described as “a systematic crisis.”
The agency is under an untold crisis, whilst a game of pass the parcel continues to play out between officials in Tusla and in the Department of Justice. And it’s not as though we are taking action to press the pause button. The demand is only continuing to grow. Government resources have been pushed to an absolute breaking point, and it would be further folly if we didn’t take the statistics on pretend child asylum seekers seriously.
They tell a major story – one which underscores the absolute fiasco at the heart of the IPAS system. We keep hearing talk about action and everything the Government is doing to make the system stricter and more robust.
But it increasingly feels like we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to unveiling the madness and negligence at the heart of government policy. The public are supposed to celebrate Minister Jim O’Callaghan’s achievements when handfuls of people are deported on chartered flights. In any sane country, the carrying out of deportations should be something we simply expect, rather than headline news.
There should be fury over these latest revelations. But more than that, there must be action.