The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has published its report into Tusla's Separated Children Seeking International Protection service, which found all the ten standards assessed as non-compliant.
The service, which was inspected in February and March this year, urgently responds to the needs of unaccompanied children who arrive in Ireland.
Inspectors reviewed 27 files of unaccompanied children.
The files sampled included unallocated cases, closed cases, cases of children who were reunified and cases of children missing from care.
HIQA focused on the effectiveness of Tusla’s governance of the service, children’s rights, and the quality and safety of child protection and welfare services that unaccompanied children received.
It found governance and resourcing of the service required significant improvement.
Systems in place in other child protection and welfare services were not being applied to the service.
It was not adhering in full to 'Children First: National Guidance for the Protection and Welfare of Children 2017’, inter-agency arrangements for children missing from care nor were Tusla’s standard business processes for the management and oversight of referrals or monitoring and reporting on performance implemented.
Resources were not deployed effectively to the service despite increasing demands due to the substantial increase in unaccompanied children arriving in Ireland from a range of countries.
Staffing challenges in 2022 resulted in a crisis response focusing primarily on the unaccompanied children's basic care needs and accommodation, rather than on the wider ongoing child protection and welfare needs of this cohort of vulnerable children.
Despite these challenges, HIQA noted that staff worked hard and ensured all unaccompanied children were seen on the day of referral and provided with accommodation.
Other areas requiring improvement included management of referrals, such as the lack of prioritisation, poor oversight of unallocated children and reunification of children with parents or relatives, timely access to support services, children’s privacy, dignity and confidentiality being compromised due to the condition of the premises.
An urgent compliance plan was issued following the inspection to address two risks relating to the safety and well-being of the children.
Minister for Children Roderic O'Gorman said the separated children's service has seen a significant increase in the number of children it deals with.
This is a consequence of the war in Ukraine and increased migration, he explained.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Philip Boucher-Hayes, he said: "So prior to 2022, it would have been dealing with maybe 30/40 children per year. And right now it has 270 children."
The majority of these children would be in the older cohort of 16 to 17, he said, but nonetheless HIQA's report is very concerning and it is something the department takes very seriously.
Mr O'Gorman said the majority of these children would enter residential or emergency residential care.
Children's Rights Alliance CEO Tanya Ward said there is a risk of sexual exploitation and prostitution regarding the children who are unaccounted for in this country.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland on Monday, she said that while she acknowledged Tusla had "a mammoth task" in responding to the diversity of need of the children arriving in the country on their own, the Child and Family Agency needed to assess its policies in this area.
"Tusla is the last safety net for children and young people and their policies at this point in time, don’t give them the reach and the scopes in terms of how to solve the problems that some of these children and young people are facing, but the other side of it is the accommodation crisis that Tusla is experiencing now," she said.
