For parents raising children in direct provision, the fear of the state taking them away is ever-present

Last September, Cebsile Mhlanga was reported to Tusla.

“I have a boy that’s six years old,” said Mhlanga recently. She also has a 13-year-old. She’s a lone mum, and they all live together in an asylum shelter in Dublin.

One time in September 2023, she had asked her roommate to pick up the younger kid from school because she was stuck at work. The woman had picked him up with her own children, two of them in their mid-teens.

At the bus stop, Mhlanga says, the other mum noticed her Leap card was out of credit and ran to a nearby shop to top up.

The kids all got on the bus together before she got back, she said. Their mum got the next one, trailing them, said Mhlanga.

Mhlanga says that when the kids arrived at the shelter, a member of staff asked the teenage boys if the little boy – Mhlanga’s kid – was with them.

They say no, says Mhlanga. “But I wouldn’t blame teenagers; you know how they behave.”

That got her flagged to Tusla for leaving her kid alone, she says, although the case was dropped after a social worker reviewed it last October. “Somebody’s telling me the issue is null and void.”

A decade ago, a Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) report about child safety and welfare in direct provision centres noted that, when it came to referrals for kids left alone, many turned out to be false alarms.

Social workers “found that many of these children were left alone for short periods when a lone parent went to queue for laundry or food”, the report says.

Still today, some parents and activists say the threat of such reports is ever-present, adding to the anxiety and stress of parenting under constant supervision, while stuck in the asylum system.

And staff at asylum shelters get only basic training to make monumental decisions about people’s lives, says Muireann Ní Raghallaigh, an associate professor of Social Work at University College Dublin (UCD).

“A few hours of Children First training is not sufficient,” she says. They should ideally have social-work backgrounds, Ní Raghallaigh said.

“At the very least, such centres need managers who have qualifications in social work or social care or community development,” she said.

More broadly, issues like reporting or threatening parents when kids are left alone illustrate the reality that International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) shelters are not suitable places for kids and families, she says.

Little training, big decisions

Between January 2022 and the end of January 2024, Tusla got 72 referrals of child neglect from managers of asylum centres, said a spokesperson.

It has processed 32 of those, of which 28 were closed either at screening or after the preliminary enquiry, and four were found to need a response, they said.

It’s unclear how many referrals were related to children left alone. The Children First Act defines neglect as “to deprive a child of adequate food, warmth, clothing, hygiene, supervision, safety or medical care”.

In October 2023, asylum seekers at the Two Gateway shelter in East Wall had accused centre workers of threatening to report them to Tusla if the kids were left unsupervised for some time, suggests documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The centre manager had told IPAS – the office within the Department of Children and Equality in charge of housing asylum-seekers and refugees – that the residents may have misunderstood what had been said, show emails.

But he “will make enquiries with his staff regarding this”, an email says.

An IPAS staff member wrote that they had stressed during briefings that “at no time should Tusla, the Child & Family Agency be used as a tool to warn parents that their child/children would be removed from the family”.

But Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) said he has heard tonnes of stories over the years of centre workers using the threat of Tusla to scare parents.

A lone parent may go to work, for example, and ask another adult woman at the centre to mind her kids, he says, and then be accused of neglecting them.

He recalls a woman with newborn twins and a small daughter at a centre in Newbridge who told him she was afraid to go downstairs where the food was served.

Khambule says the centre didn’t have a lift, and she was afraid that if she left one of the kids behind, a staffer might report her to Tusla. “So she got a cooker, and she was cooking in the bedroom.”

Parenting the parents

It’s not easy to be around the kids 24/7, Khambule says. “Parents in direct provision are suffering because there is a lack of parenting support.”

“If I have asked a friend or a neighbour to look after my child, they shouldn’t get involved with that,” he says.

Fiona Hurley, the CEO of the migrant-rights non-profit NASC, says the scarcity of childcare support for everyone in the country impacts parents in direct provision centres most profoundly.

Relying on friends and neighbours to look after the kids can get them in trouble with centre staff, she says.

“Some of our service users have expressed their frustration that it feels like their parenting is being monitored by centre staff,” said Hurley.

They feel they have lost the freedom to make parenting choices like leaving the kids to play by themselves for a bit, she says.

A 2019 study co-authored by Ní Raghallaigh, the UCD associate professor, also found that parents have to tolerate intrusive observations and interventions in reception centres.

And, “an undue burden is placed on personnel to respond to situations for which they do not have necessary skills”, it says.

Unprepared deciders

When a new centre opens, a designated IPAS worker notifies its manager that the staff have to take a Children First e-learning module, said a spokesperson for the Department of Children and Equality.

The designated worker also acts as a liaison person under the Children First Act 2015 and informs the manager that it’s mandatory to report concerns about child residents, they said.

“The designated member also monitors the centre’s adherence with requirements of the Child Safeguarding Statement Compliance Unit,” the spokesperson said.

IPAS continues to deliver child-protection briefings to staff at all of its centres, they said.

The Children First Act 2015 defines harm to a child as assault, ill-treatment, or neglect of the child in a way that seriously affects or is likely to affect their health, development and safety – or sexual abuse of the child.

Ní Raghallaigh, the UCD associate professor, says basic training isn’t enough for centre workers to make informed calls, and that a lack of training can sometimes lead to oppressive practices.

Relevant social-work training would change that, she says. “Within these disciplines, training will normally emphasise anti oppressive practice and the importance of reflexivity”.

An April 2021 report by the Ombudsman for Children’s Office mentions that IPAS had told the body that it had learnt “a misleading notice was issued to parents which implied that child protection and welfare services may remove children as a result of a lack of parental supervision in the centre”.

Not suitable for kids

The Ombudsman for Children’s Office report said that IPAS centres are not suitable for kids.

It called on IPAS to immediately stop using commercial hotels as emergency shelters to house asylum seekers and come up with a contingency plan to respond to capacity pressures.

In a newer report from October 2023, the Ombudsman for Children’s Office says it understands that the Russian government’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had triggered a massive jump in accommodation demand and strained IPAS’s supply.

It doesn’t seem likely that the government can stop housing children in emergency shelters anytime soon, it says.

The extraordinary pressures on IPAS aside, the report says, its overreliance on the private commercial accommodation industry has caused multiple system failures. “Sadly, children are at the sharp end of these failures,” it says.

Mhlanga, the woman who was reported because her child arrived back from school without an adult, says it made her angry and anxious.

She complained to the manager. But the manager sided with the staff member, Mhlanga said.

“I feel like I was treated unfairly,” she said, standing in the wind at Finglas Business Park, where she’s taking a course to upskill. “They took this issue outside of context.”