Salary scales for staff in the challenging special care area of social work are set to increase in a bid to improve retention and increase the number of available spaces for highly troubled teenagers, the Supreme Court has heard.
Lawyers for Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe said the new scale, which was still being worked out, would not be a “magic-bullet solution” to the long-flagged staffing issues facing the sector but it was the “beginning, hopefully, of the end”.
The Child and Family Agency (CFA, otherwise known as Tusla) operates three special care units where high-risk 11-17 year olds can be detained, on foot of a High Court order, on a short-term basis to stabilise their often volatile behaviour and reduce their risk of harm.
For some time, the agency has been unable to provide special care places to all children who need them and for whom the court has ordered detention. It says it has enough physical beds but is suffering from an acute staffing shortage due primarily to being unable to offer attractive enough wages as it is bound by public sector pay rules set by the Department of Public Expenditure.
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The department has repeatedly refused to sanction Tusla’s requests for a payment increase to special care workers. The court heard the department believes pay is not the main blockage to opening up more spaces and that increasing special care payments could have a knock-on effect for other sectors.
However, on Wednesday, the Minister’s senior counsel, Gerard Durcan, said the department had agreed with Tusla’s most recent proposal, submitted last August, seeking to largely align special care staff pay with higher rates offered to workers at Oberstown youth detention centre.
He told the Supreme Court that discussions about the details of the new scale were ongoing. The department still “does not believe money will solve the problem”, but it had reached the view that it must see if this step helped, he said, adding that €1 million of Budget 2025 had been ringfenced for special care.
His submissions were made in response to a mother’s Supreme Court appeal seeking to find that Tusla was in contempt of a High Court order for the detention of her 14-year-old son in special care. The court heard he belatedly secured a place some seven months after the High Court ordered it.
The court heard claims the boy was in “grave” danger while awaiting a special care space. His community-care placement broke down, he was expressing thoughts of suicidal ideation and he was selling class-A drugs, the mother’s lawyers told the court.
The High Court ruled last March that the mother’s contempt application did not follow the correct procedure and should have been accompanied by a motion seeking to bring the person allegedly in contempt before the court.
Tusla’s senior counsel, Feichín McDonagh, said his client contended it was impossible for it to comply with the special care order, which it had been legally obliged to apply for. He said contempt was “not just a failure to comply with the order; it must be more than that”, such as “contumacious disregard” for an order.
Mr McDonagh has also objected to the application on the basis that it was brought in a procedurally incorrect way.
When questioning lawyers during the hearing, Mr Justice Maurice Collins said the issues in special care were first raised seven years ago, yet the State parties seemed to be playing a “very expensive game of pass the parcel in the Supreme Court”.
He said the boy’s social worker had been “extremely committed” to him, but the child’s best interests had not been served by the interactions over the two-day appeal.
Mr Durcan said the department understood the situation surrounding special care was completely unacceptable” and that it had to be dealt with. “It is being dealt with now,” he added.
The five judges reserved their decision on the mother’s appeal.
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