Fresh documents reveal that ‘Ideal Care’, the company with whom Tusla cut ties following revelations that they had not conducted proper background checks on staff, failed to purchase new clothes for a child in their care for a period of five months to the point that “his clothes do not fit him”. The child in question was reported to have spent all his time in his room playing computer games, and had ceased attending school. The Alternative Care Registration and Inspection Reports for 2023 have been released to the Aontú Leader Peadar Tóibín TD, following a Parliamentary Question to the Minister for Children.
Ideal Care, which is currently under investigation by Gardaí for having ‘fabricated’ pre employment staff checks and altering vetting files, is one of 27 companies which provided ‘Special Emergency Accommodation’ to children in State Care. Between 2022 and 2023 the company received over €9 million from Tusla for their services. The inspection reports from 2023 show that the three inspected centres had only one child each in their care during this period.
There are, at any given time, roughly 5,500 children under the care of Tusla, 90% of these children are in foster care, and 7% in residential care. However, in recent times Tusla have begun to rely on ‘SEAs’ to accommodate children, which they’ve openly admitted in a letter to Deputy Tóibín are “unregulated placements mostly in rented accommodation, apartments and houses with staffing from third party providers”. There are currently 170 children in these arrangements, 106 of whom are unaccompanied minors seeking international protection in Ireland.
Ideal Care Services were subjected to an unannounced inspection between 7th and 8th February 2023, which found, among other issues, no police check for one staff member, an out-of-date work visa and unclear garda vetting. The report noted that there was one young person residing in the location, and that “the staff member with unclear vetting was currently working“. The young person in question had “refused to attend school since December 2022“, and inspectors noted that they “did not see evidence of any alternative education placement being sourced”. They spoke to the young person who said that they did nothing but “play games console and spend time in their room”. The report goes on to say that “when asked about addressing goals, making plans for the future, doing work with the staff, the young person stated that this did not happen”.
Inspection of two centres operated by the company took place on 7th and 28th March 2023. In the case of one of these centres, which was in operation as a Special Emergency Arrangement, the company is recorded of having “failed to advise” Tusla of it’s existence. The inspection into that centre was triggered after Tusla only became aware of its existence following receipt of “unsolicited information” from HIQA. Both centres inspected were accommodating one child each.
The inspector visited the company’s offices during the review into the unregistered centre to view their staff files and had “immediate concerns about the authenticity of the information supplied in the files”. The report goes on to explain that “the same or similar wording was used in a substantial number of references that were purported to be written by different people from different organisations. For example, five different referees, from five different companies over a span of ten months all wrote the same words in their reference for four different candidates”. The signatures, in some cases, at the bottom of the reference, did not match the named referee. The inspector also had suspicion that a Garda Vetting Declaration may have been altered.
A third inspection of Ideal Care Services was conducted on the 25th May 2023, inspectors spoke to the same young person with whom they had spoken in February. This report noted that while there was an activity plan in place for the child, “if he did not want to follow the plan for that day then he just stayed in the house playing his computer games”. It was during this inspection that the issue of clothing came up during an interview with the young person, and staff at the centre. The inspector in this report says: “There has been no new clothes bought for him since Christmas and his clothes do not fit him. The manager confirmed that the agency does not buy clothes for the young person”. The report also points to the fact that the same young person, the sole young person in the residence, had been in the care of the company for one year at the time of inspection.
Other concerns raised during this inspection included the fact that the staff names on the rota did not match with the names of the staff on shift during the inspection. Concerns were also raised over the child’s diet and an online consultation with a nutritionist was scheduled for two days after the inspection.
Two centres operated by Ideal Care Services were removed from Tusla’s register on 20th June 2023. Last month a series of articles in The Irish Times Newspaper reported on the company in question, including that there is now a Garda investigation into the falsifying of staff files. Prior to the publication of these articles, the CEO of Tusla told RTE’s Today with Claire Byrne that all staff in SEA’s were “absolutely” vetted. This, we now know, was untrue.
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Luke Peter Silke 