All credit to Carol Nolan TD for her persistence in raising again and again an issue which should be making headlines until decisive action has been taken – but shamefully seems to languish amongst the lowest of the state’s and the public’s priorities while we focus on historical wrongs or how much we hate Donald Trump.
Last week in the Dáil, the Independent TD for Offaly, again raised the appalling vista that some of our most vulnerable girls are being raped and sexually exploited by gangs of predatory men – and it is happening while they are in the care of TUSLA, the state agency charged with keeping them safe.
She said that she and many others “want to make sure these predators – people who exploit children – face the full hammer of the law. It should come down on them heavy and a message be sent out that that is what anyone who tries to exploit vulnerable children in State care will be facing.”
And Deputy Nolan said that are children being picked up from airports where they are coming in unaccompanied and “being placed in all sorts of settings”.
“The message that needs to go out is that it will not be tolerated and, more importantly, that we are monitoring the situation,” she told the Dáil. To the best of my knowledge, there are children being picked up from airports where they are coming in unaccompanied and they are being placed in all sorts of settings.”
It is two years since a scoping report from UCD called ‘Protecting Against Predators: A Scoping Study on the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Young People in Ireland’ outlined what is happening to children – because that’s what these girls are – at the hands of sick, evil men.
As we previously described, the report revealed that these girls in care in Ireland are clearly being targeted for sexual exploitation and abuse by gangs – and found numerous cases where girls in the care of TUSLA, the State’s child and family agency, were “being coerced or enticed to provide sex acts to multiple men in exchange for a variety of goods” including clothes and jewellery.
The situation, according to the report, is so out-of-control that predatory gangs of men would identify residents where girls in care are being accommodated — and would wait around accommodation centres, even going so far as to wait in hotel lobbies where under-age girls were staying.
In one shocking revelation, the study revealed that men were “hanging around hotel lobbies” in order to sexually exploit children that were being accommodated there as a temporary State care solution.
The report expressed fears that sexual exploitation of children is going “under the radar” in Ireland, while drawing parallels with child sex abuse that went on in Rotherham and Rochdale in the UK – which was characterised by a failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse that took place from the 1980s until the late 2010s.
In some hotels where children in care were brought to stay because of a lack of residential care places, the report found that men were “hanging around hotel lobbies to sexually exploit children that they knew were being accommodated there as a temporary State care solution”.
At times the girls were “being taxied” to other hotels by the predators, sometimes to be given drugs and then raped by gangs of men. In one almost unbelievable, horrific incident the predators “were banging on the doors, banging on the windows and absolutely everything to try to get into the place” when the care staff tried to keep a girl from leaving with these monsters.
Shouldn’t these appalling revelations have led to a media furore and urgent action from the government and the relevant authorities? Instead, with some few exceptions, the response has been mostly understated,
Carol Nolan is one of those exceptions. She has raised the matter repeatedly and n November 2023 described the sexual exploitation by predators of children in care as an “emergency”, and said there is “a desperate and almost unforgiveable lack of urgency being applied to this issue at the inter-departmental level”.
“It has received nothing like the kind of media and political attention that it deserves,” she said at the time. But, by October 2024, then Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman told Nolan that he had still not met with the Department of Justice in regard to what was revealed in the report although he had “sought a meeting with the authors of the report shortly after its publication”.
Last week in the Dáil, Nolan called on Tánaiste Simon Harris to ensure that every available Government resource is marshalled to ensure that children in state care are protected from the nightmare of organised sexual exploitation and the risk of human trafficking. She said that while the State may move slowly, but predators do not. “They are relentless in their poisonous pursuit of these children”.
We were told how some of the most vulnerable children in this State were going missing or running away from home or a care placement, despite the fact that some had an intellectual disability or had suffered prior sexual abuse or neglect. I raised this issue in this Chamber in November 2023 with the then Tánaiste, Deputy Micheál Martin. We had a constructive engagement and agreement on this issue.
Since then, I have tabled numerous parliamentary questions on the issue, the most recent in the past few days. I have been informed in response to one of these questions that while a final draft of the commissioned report on a systematic review to examine institutional, organisational and organised child abuse, including trafficking and exploitation of children and young people, has been received by the Department of children, it is still being assessed for final consideration and observations.
It has been two years since the SERP [Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy] report was published, with some serious concerns, and 21 months since I raised it on the floor of this House. I fully understand that there is a need to generate a robust evidence base to inform the State’s policy and practice responses to institutional and organised abuse and its prevention. My fear is that this issue has fallen out of the spotlight and the sense of urgency, that we so badly need, is not appropriate to the level of the emergency that these vulnerable children are facing.
The State may move slowly, but unfortunately predators do not. They are relentless in their poisonous pursuit of these children. We must be equally determined and relentless in our efforts to stop them and we need to do it urgently. We have seen from the UK’s experience what happens when the State appears to deprioritise these concerns. I am not saying that is happening here to the same extent, but the Tánaiste will agree with me that we cannot even allow the perception to take hold that these vulnerable children are not on the State’s priority list.
Will he do what he can to speed up the introduction of robust protections for the children identified in the SERP report and elsewhere? It is clear that the current system is failing children if they continue to be targeted by such vicious and violent predators. Unfortunately, that continues.
And she warned: “we have seen what happens in other jurisdictions such as the UK when issues like this are dropped down the political priority list. We cannot allow that to happen here.”
In his response, Tánaiste Simon Harris thanked “the Deputy for highlighting this extremely important issue and for highlighting it on an ongoing basis and for her work on this. We appreciate that. It is important.”
He stated his belief that “there is a special place in Hell for those who commit a sexual crime against a child and while we can’t do much about places in Hell, we can do things about places in prison”.
He also said that he would “absolutely follow up with the Minister, Deputy Foley, in the first instance, about the SERP report and the issues the Deputy has identified, and ask her to come back to the Deputy with a timeline.”
That was a constructive response, but the Dáil will now break for a lengthy summer holiday and it would be simply unacceptable for this issue to get put on the long finger once again. The report from the Department must be published without delay – and Garda action needs to be taken against the gangs of predators sexually abusing children in care.