TUSLA has confirmed to Gript that it has no “formal procurement process” in place before allowing private companies to provide emergency accommodation to vulnerable children in care.
The top ten companies providing the special emergency accommodation (SEA) were, between them, paid roughly €60 million in 2023.
For more than a decade now, a shortage of residential centres directly run by TUSLA or a State department to cater for very vulnerable children in care has meant that these children are placed in what one judge described as “unsuitable” and “unapproved” private placements.
Tusla had previously confirmed in writing to at least one TD that SEAs are “unregulated placements mostly in rented accommodation, apartments, and houses with staffing from third party providers”.
Questions are being asked regarding the SEAs, which most observers might assume have gone through a procurement process with the authorities before being used to accommodate children.
TUSLA informed Gript that: “Due to the emergency and temporary nature of SEAs, Tusla has not initiated a formal procurement process, rather individual SEAs are put in place at a local level based on the immediate needs of children and young people, under the governance of SEA Oversight Groups in each region.”
TUSLA also referred to Central Compliance Units which are tasked with maintaining a “centralised national database of staff screening information (relating to each provider) to provide assurances on the vetting, qualifications, and experience of staff employed by external agencies/organisations providing care in SEAs.”
It also conducts “intelligence-led monitoring visits to individual SEAs”.
Given the fact that the SEA providers have been found in several instances not to be looking after what TUSLA describes as “immediate needs of children and young people,” let alone ensuring that they were in a “place of safety”, there ought to be an immediate and urgent focus on oversight of SEAs, including a properly conducted tendering and assessment process.
As a Gript colleague pointed out, the criteria for any other agency – be they educational, sporting or private childcare providers to people who need others to mind their children while at work – are extremely strict, regarding vetting and safety in particular. This should always be the approach, given some of the revelations regarding child abuse and neglect that has occurred in Ireland.
Yet, we now have a situation where there have been reports of children being taken out of accommodation contracted by TUSLA. Some of those children have apparently disappeared. Some, it would appear, have been forced into prostitution and sexual slavery.
A disturbing scoping report published last June found that:
Vulnerable children in care in Ireland are clearly being targeted for sexual exploitation and abuse by “gangs of predatory men”.
It reported 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.
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.
Yet now TUSLA has confirmed that the private accommodation centres don’t even go through a tendering process.
Aontú leader Peadar Toíbín referred in the Dáil two weeks ago to one case of a 14 year-old girl who went missing within minutes of having been transferred into the care of TUSLA. She was found one year later in appalling circumstances having been forced by a criminal gang to work as a prostitute.
Toíbín also referred to the fact that communications from retired Justice Dermot Simms were destroyed in Minister Roderic O’Gorman’s office on the grounds of concerns regarding data protection.
The Child Law Project published a letter from Simms sent to the Minister in May 2023 referring to his concerns over special emergency accommodation and other aspects of what he described as an “unprecedented crisis” facing the agency and the children under its responsibility.
“The former Dublin metropolitan District Court judge [Simms] warned that up to 130 highly vulnerable children were in “unsuitable” and “unapproved” placements, including hotels and B&Bs, because there was nowhere else to put them,” Carol Coulter of the Project previously wrote.
TUSLA in its response to Gript also referred to the role played by EPIC (Empowering People in Care). This is another private company registered as a charity which TUSLA contracts “to provide additional advocacy services for young people in SEAs.”
EPIC is a registered charity and was established in 2004 to “advance the interests and welfare of young people with care experience in Ireland.” According to its website, EPIC can appoint an advocate for a young person in care so that the person might find a sympathetic ear and voice if they require assistance including in making a complaint about the manner in which they are being cared for.
That is obviously a key role given the vulnerability of many young people in care, and in particular those placed in SEAs.
Because of that role, and the access which EPIC has to young people in emergency accommodation, Gript contacted the agency with a series of questions regarding their exact role in the provision and monitoring of SEAs and with regard to any knowledge they might have of the serious questions that have arisen in relation to all of this. We had received no response from EPIC prior to publication.
The seven founders of EPIC were all at that time working for various health boards or in NGOs. They included Breda O’Donovan, then secretary of the Irish Foster Care Association; Ray Dooley, then CEO of the Children’s Rights Alliance; and Gráinne Burke who was then a regional manager for Barnardo’s.
According to its most recent financial statement for 2022, EPIC had an income of €1,435,903, with €1,316,789 coming directly from TUSLA. Staff and other governance costs accounted for €1.24 million or over 86% of income. EPIC employed 18 staff members of whom 8 were employed as “advocates.”
Many of the staff members are from career NGO backgrounds rather than the professional health or counselling sector. Chief Executive Officer, Marissa Ryan, worked for Oxfam, Concern, BeLongTo, and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. Communications Manager Caroline Reid was formerly with Irish Network Against Racism, the Irish Refugee Council and the Migrant Rights Centre.
Indeed, of the 25 people listed as part of the current team, just 9 are listed as advocates who are presumably in direct contact with young people in care situations, while the remainder are employed in various administrative capacities.
TUSLA is entrusted with the immense responsibility of looking after what are quite often very vulnerable children, but questions of the extent to which they are meeting that responsibility continue to mount.