Ireland’s child protection system is a high-stakes game of Jenga

Late 20th century American philosopher John Rawls proposed a simple test for thinking about justice: how would you assess a society if you didn’t know what your own place in it would be?

The question goes to the heart of justice. The success of a society cannot be measured by what it enables the powerful to achieve, but by what happens to those who are unable to protect themselves. And few citizens are less well able to protect themselves than children at the mercy of the Irish care system.

The High Court recently heard that a 14-year-old girl who was being severely sexually exploited by a group of men could not be placed in special care. Even though there are empty physical beds, roughly half of the State’s special care places are unavailable because there aren’t enough staff to operate them. So while the State has the physical facilities to protect this child, it can’t provide the service of removing her from horrifying and dangerous circumstances.

Kitty Holland reported yesterday that there was also no special care bed for a boy who vomited up 37 bags of crack cocaine he was concealing from gardaí. The boy is using fentanyl and is “at serious risk of death” due to drug use or drug debts. “This child would not be a fentanyl user if [Tusla] had complied with the court order [that he be in special care],” Judge John Jordan said.

Nor is there a bed for a girl of 17 who was recently found “unresponsive on a roadside” and could not remember what had happened to her when she was brought to hospital complaining of pain in her pelvic area.

Despite the State’s legal obligation to put these children into a secure location for their own protection, it is unable to fulfil this requirement because it has failed to co-ordinate the operational facilities it has already built.

We use the word “crisis” often in Ireland. The housing crisis; the healthcare crisis; the transport crisis; the cost-of-living crisis; the climate crisis – each one a shorthand for a failure so abysmal that it demands urgent change. And yet years come and go, and the “crisis” transforms into a permanent feature of contemporary Irish society.

For so long, and under so many governments, the State has failed to protect children it has identified as being in danger. Eventually the kind of outcomes and excuses heard in the High Court recently have become an expectation. And perhaps this is why these cases do not send shock waves through society – after all, we tend to only talk about the things that surprise us. Institutional failure has become so normalised that even the most appalling circumstances have become unremarkable.

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These teenagers are facing existential battles for their safety, their dignity and their future – against people who would exploit them or drug dealers who want their money. And now also against the State itself. The institutions that are supposed to protect them have themselves become another obstacle they must overcome in their young lives.

Which institutions, exactly? There are many of them, each looking after haphazardly disconnected parts of the child protection system.

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There’s Tusla, which oversees child protection and enables special care placements. There’s the Department of Children, which funds and oversees the system. There’s the Department of Public Expenditure, assigning the budgets and resources needed to staff it. Then there’s the HSE, looking after health and mental health services – a vital part of integrated care. On top of this, there is Hiqa, inspecting and regulating care facilities. The court heard this week that Hiqa is prohibiting Tusla from admitting any further children – even when other children are discharged – to the largest unit, Crannog Nua in north Dublin, due to continuing safety concerns around staffing.

While it is the courts that order protective measures, the courts cannot staff the beds required to deliver them. And finally, there is the Department of Justice, which has responsibility for justice policy and legislation. Each of these seven bodies publishes its own data, has its own leadership teams and works to different timelines and priorities.

What we have in Ireland instead of a functioning system is disjointed decision-making amid policies that might make sense for each individual body, but that do not create systemic care for individual children – resulting in a game of Jenga, with critical pieces of responsibility distributed carelessly across institutions. This in turn leaves dangerous gaps wherever their resources and operational processes don’t intersect. Policies might coincidentally overlap in some places; but in others, gigantic holes emerge, swallowing up whole lives and futures.

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How many lives, exactly? Tusla’s referrals more than doubled over the last decade, to 106,444 in 2025. This doesn’t mean that every child requires intensive intervention – but look at the sheer magnitude of the responsibility that lies with the child protection system. One in every 23 individual children.

Ireland has 26 potential special-care beds. Though as of October, according to Tusla, only 13 were operational because of staffing shortages, a catastrophically insufficient number.

Much like the child protection crisis, the staffing crisis is a semi-permanent feature of Irish life. The High Court has long documented years of staffing undercapacity as a reason for repeated failure to provide beds for children in danger. So while many people wonder why the Government won’t fund more beds, this leads to a more challenging question: why has the State created the conditions in which it cannot recruit enough people to deliver its most basic public services?

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Successive budgets show the crudeness of political thinking here: just throw more money at the problem, and somehow more beds, more staff, more transport will arrive. But money alone stopped solving Irish capacity problems years ago. Money can’t solve the capacity problems in the care sector if the care workers that we urgently need to provide Government services can’t afford to be housed themselves.

We see this in the numbers. Tusla’s budget for this year is €1.46 billion, up €188 million, in the same year that it reported €112.7 million in cost savings, presumably partly accounted for by the staff it couldn’t find to pay – while also finding itself in contempt of court for failing to secure special care placements. How should we think about value for money here?

This disgraceful system needs immediate structural reform. Child protection needs a single oversight body, with a person who is answerable for the child’s protection, rather than just budgets. We need to know urgently how many children the State was legally obliged to protect and did not. If we can’t demand accountability for the most vulnerable in Ireland then what, exactly, are our institutions for?

As Rawls might have concluded, the measure of a functional society is not whether we decide these children matter, but whether anybody will have to answer when they are failed. And right now, nobody does.