“Having private, for-profit care goes against all you are trying to achieve for children in care,” says Terry Dignan, a spokesperson for charities that run children’s homes.
“Having private, for-profit care goes against all you are trying to achieve for children in care,” says Terry Dignan, a spokesperson for the Children’s Residential and Aftercare Voluntary Association, representing the charities that run children’s homes, among other services.
There is a major shortage of placements for kids in care, so some are being moved around between emergency placements.
Or they are being left in unsuitable “special emergency arrangements”, or left too long in their natural families even though they should have been removed.
Opening more privately-run children’s homes may appear to be part of the solution, but Dignan says it's not.
Instead, he says that lower pay and conditions in private children’s homes lead to high staff turnover, which is detrimental to the aim of providing consistency for kids in care.
Sixty percent of children’s homes in Ireland are run by private companies, according to a spokesperson for Tusla, the state agency responsible for improving wellbeing and outcomes for children.
That, Dignan says, is unsustainable. It also presents risks to the state and the children, he said.
He points to the UK, where in November the government announced plans to cap the profit that private companies can make off of children’s care.
“One of the most entrenched challenges facing children and social workers is some private providers, that are siphoning off money that should be going towards vulnerable children,” said a statement from the UK’s Department of Education at the time.
The government in Wales has gone further, committing to end the practice of private companies running children’s homes in the next five years.
Yet Ireland continues to expand private provision of children’s homes. Tusla says it struggles to recruit staff for new children’s homes, yet private companies that pay less continue to expand.
In its strategic plan for residential care 2022 to 2025, Tusla's strategy aimed “to incrementally reverse our disproportionate dependency on private residential care” from 60 percent to 50 percent – increasing the share of residential beds run by Tusla itself, or by charities.
But it has failed to do so. Private providers continue to run the majority of children’s homes.
In Ireland, the majority of children in care – around 87 percent – are in foster families, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Children.
The other 13 percent need residential placements, otherwise called children’s homes. These are houses where children live with professional staff, rather than with families.
For children who’ve been judged to need residential placements, there’s a major shortage of placements.
This means that “Children who should be in care are not being brought into care,” and this can lead to further trauma for children, says Monica Hynds, the interim director of the guardian ad litem service at the charity Barnardos, which provides legal advocacy to children in care.
There are around 550 beds in children’s homes, also known as residential care.
Those are all full and, according to a Tusla spokesperson, there were 170 children on the waiting list for residential placements as of February 2025.
Of those, 40 children – about 24 percent – were living in special emergency arrangements (SEAs), which are non-registered residential placements.
The rest would be in various kinds of other unsustainable situations – with foster families that can’t keep them anymore, or with friends or relatives temporarily, for example.
Above and beyond those 170 children who are on the waiting list for residential placements, another 103 young people were in SEAs and not on the waiting list, says the Tusla spokesperson.
The Tusla spokesperson says that some of those will be returning home, going on to foster families, or going on to Tusla’s aftercare service when they turn 18.
Hynds has 20 children on her caseload, and six of those currently need a new long-term placement, she says.
Sometimes, a foster family takes a child on an emergency basis but isn’t available to care for them long-term, but the child remains stuck there because there is nowhere else for them.
“The capacity to match children to a suitable foster placement is gone completely in some areas,” she says.
In general, residential care isn’t considered suitable for small children, but due to a shortage of foster families, very young children are ending up in residential care, she says. “It's a very real problem,” she says.
“You only get one go at being six,” says Hynds, at Barnardos.
Sometimes there is nowhere for a child to stay locally, says Hynds, in either foster care or residential care, so their social worker will drive them anywhere in Ireland where there is an emergency bed available, in a short-term residential or emergency foster family.
“It's literally a night-by-night scenario, and that is happening all the time,” says Hynds.
She knows a child who was from the border counties and was driven to Cork for a couple of nights, she says. “It's obviously hugely traumatic for the children; they don’t know where they are going to be.”
The night-by-night system disrupts the child’s life completely, and is also devastating for the social workers, says Hynds.
“It is soul-destroying. I would say that it contributes to the turnover of staff within Tusla,” she says. “You will only do that a couple of times before you start to think, this is not what I came into social work to do.”
The Tusla spokesperson said they do not record the number of children who are being moved around on a night-by-night basis.
“Tusla is experiencing an unprecedented demand across all service types,” says the Tusla spokesperson. “The Agency is currently challenged to balance the capacity of provision with the demand for services.”
There are issues recruiting staff, she says, as well as increased complexity of the needs of children in care, and an increased number of separated children seeking international protection.
Eurostat data shows there’s been an increase in unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Ireland, from around five or 10 a month in 2021, to more like 20 or 25 a month in more recent years.
As the figure rose, Tusla downgraded supports for these children arriving in the country by themselves.
Two years ago, Judge Dermot Simms, wrote a public letter, saying he’d been assigned to the Child Care Courts for more than four years, and wanted “to express my utmost concern for the immediate predicament and welfare of children who are in the care of the State”.
Simms flagged that children’s needs were not being met to the legal standard, and said there was the risk of future legal cases against the state, due to its failures.
Dignan, of the Children’s Residential and Aftercare Voluntary Association, says the shortage of care placements for children in Ireland dates back around 10 years so it shouldn’t be called a crisis anymore – as it’s become a permanent situation.
He said he fears that the neglect of children in care is becoming normalised. “If it is genuinely a crisis, why is nothing being done about it?”
Hynds, of Barnardos, says the problem is complex. “There is not one simple, easy answer to this,” she says.
The state needs to invest in early intervention and family support to keep children in their families in the first place, and it needs to take urgent action to address the placement crisis, Hynds says. “At times, it is hard to see the urgency.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Children says it allocated additional funding to Tusla in the 2025 budget.
“Recruitment and retention have been an ongoing challenge for Tusla, and the Agency is actively pursuing a number of measures to address these challenges,” the department spokesperson said.
To address the shortage of placements, Tusla said in its strategy for residential care 2022 to 2025 that it would open 104 new beds in publicly run or non-profit children’s homes.
But as that strategy nears its end, so far the agency has opened only 31 of those new beds, says the Tusla spokesperson.
Meanwhile, since 2022, private companies have opened 45 new beds, says the spokesperson.
Tusla says mainstream residential care run by private companies is slightly cheaper compared to its own, or the charity-run facilities
The agency said it spends €8,702 per child per week in mainstream beds in its own children’s homes, €8,141 per week for a charity-run children’s home placement, and €7,651 per week for a child living in a privately run children’s home, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act,
But Dignan says the Children’s Residential and Aftercare Voluntary Association – which represents charities that operate children’s homes – totally disputes the figure for the cost of a charity-run children’s home placement.
The association compiled data from 10 of the 13 charity providers in Ireland and the average charged was €5,094 per child per week, which is €3,000 less per child per week than the Tusla figures, Dignan said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Children says it “recognises that an over-reliance on private providers increases the risk of over-reliance, sustainability, value for money, and capacity.”
The Minister for Children, Fianna Fáil TD Norma Foley, has called on Tusla to increase its residential care capacity in a performance framework, from 2024 to 2026.
“And to progress commitments contained in its Strategic Plans to reduce reliance on private provision,” the Department of Children spokesperson said.
This week the roadway was again covered in shattered glass fallen from the Boat House office block there.
“You stand on the pier and it’s different every day. The sky is changing, the water, the clouds. It’s the most wonderful facility. The whole prom is.”
Changes would bring more routes into the green spaces, as well as natural play areas, added amenities and upgraded pitches.
“These motocross bikes are going up and down the streets outside their houses because normally they'd have somewhere to go, now they've nowhere to go.”
