Minister for Children James Reilly has said that any child
in an emergency situation will be dealt with urgently by the Child and Family Agency (CFA).
According to the Mr Reilly, “considerable resources” have and are being made available to the agency. “There is no question of anyone in an emergency situation not being dealt with.”
There are issues around priority cases, and Mr Reilly said he wanted social workers to be free from clerical and other work and allocated to those.
He said that 90 social workers have been recruited and another 90 were in the process of being recruited.
“The money is there, the jobs are there,” he said, but it was not easy to recruit social workers in particularly demanding areas.
Asked if he was saying that staff shortages were not an issue of resource allocation, the Minister said it was “certainly not at the moment”.
Mr Reilly was speaking to reporters in Dublin yesterday after CFA chief executive Gordon Jeyes earlier this week warned that social services will be reduced to a “basic child protection service” next year unless significant additional money is provided.
The agency took over responsibilty for child and family services from the HSE earlier this year and is running about €25 million over budget, due mainly to inherited legal bills.
Mr Jeyes said the CFA will need an additional €45 million in 2015 to keep services at a standstill, with little scope for further savings.
There are about 160 vacant posts across the agency, with services operating at about 70 per cent of their staffing levels.
Child protection campaigners have voiced concerns that some 9,000 cases of abuse, neglect or welfare concerns over children at risk are waiting to be allocated a social worker, including more than 3,000 classified as “high priority”.
