Sir, – Last week, the Health Information and Quality Authority identified that there are children in care in the midland region who do not have social workers allocated to them. They also said that some of those children have asked to have contact with their birth families but Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, has been unable to facilitate that due to the lack of social workers. These children are drifting in care due a failure by the State to provide them with adequate services. This is at a time when our Minister for Finance has managed to find €26 million in the budget for sheep. The Fine Gael slogan at the time of the children’s referendum was “Every child matters”. They clearly do not matter as much as sheep! – Yours, etc,
JOHN BYRNE,
Lecturer in
Social Care Practice,
Waterford Institute
of Technology.