Tusla saw a 10 per cent increase last year on the number of referrals it received in 2024, a committee hearing has been told.
For the first 11 months of 2025, the child and family agency received 98,122 referrals, a 10 per cent increase over the previous year. It expects the total number of referrals for 2025 to be around 106,000.
The Oireachtas Committee on Children and Equality met on Thursday to discuss child poverty and deprivation and heard from the Ombudsman for Children’s Office and Tusla.
There have been more than 750 cases referred to Tusla’s children missing in education team since July.
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Of the referred cases, 615 have been closed and the remainder are being worked through by the team, Áine O’Keeffe, director of the Tusla education support service, told the committee.
In 2025, the team introduced two dedicated educational welfare officers, reviewed the standard operating business and developed standard operating procedures that “really strengthened, with learnings from some very recent tragic cases and years of implementations, strengthened how we go about that,” she said.
Gerry Hone, national director for services and integration at Tusla, in his opening statement to the committee said that children living in poverty are disproportionately represented in child welfare and neglect referrals, which together account for 63 per cent of all referrals. “These referrals often reflect the relationship between poverty and children living with domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, parental addiction and mental health difficulties, homelessness and exposure to criminality and exploitation,” he said.
In the first half of last year, more than 22,500 children received a family support service from Tusla or Tusla-funded providers, representing almost two per cent of all children in Ireland, he said.
“These challenges have been intensified in recent years by the impact of Covid-19, rising homelessness, increased migration due to conflict and displacement, and systemic discrimination, particularly experienced by Traveller and Roma communities,” he added.
Mr Hone said there have been “great improvements in staffing levels” but Tusla “continues to struggle in providing adequate numbers of placements for young people who actually need it in our systems.”
He said the agency needs an extra 300 social workers to “meet the rise in need”.
“The need out there is constant and referrals are constant. It’s busy all the time,” he said.
He also said demand from separated children seeking international protection is “huge”.
More than 260,000 children in Ireland live in households experiencing deprivation, the committee heard.
Nuala Ward, director of investigations at the Ombudsman for Children’s Office told the committee: “Poverty can be a symptom of state failures ... it’s the child that fundamentally suffers.”
