Tusla is required to treat people presenting as unaccompanied minors as children despite “any reservations” it might have about their real age, briefing papers show.
Documents from the child and family agency, released under Freedom of Information law, show it and the Department of Children were bracing for media questions about its age assessment process in the days after a Ukrainian teenager was fatally stabbed while staying in a Dublin care centre.
A Somali national accused of the murder of 17-year-old Vadym Davydenko told a court last month that his documents were false. Vadym was stabbed on October 15th at a Tusla-run facility in Donaghmede just days after he fled Kyiv.
Documents show that Tusla chief executive Kate Duggan wrote to officials at the Department of Children on October 24th saying that age verification for unaccompanied minors was an issue that had been discussed with the Government for the previous two years.
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“Unfortunately, the issue remains, and Department colleagues will be aware, that there is not a shared position due to the different interpretation of legislation underpinning [international protection] and childcare legislation, and we need departmental engagement in relation to same,” Ms Duggan wrote.
The Department of Justice was last year forced to clarify that the International Protection Office (IPO) is ultimately responsible for determining the age of an applicant being treated as an unaccompanied minor in the system.
This is despite the fact that, in practice, Tusla was the agency assumed to be responsible for determining someone’s age.
Ms Duggan said a meeting between Tusla, the Department of Children and the Department of Justice was “urgently needed”.
Emails also show that Tusla had prepared a media statement “pending any media queries that may come in over the weekend”. She told the Department of Children’s communications team “to ensure we are all in agreement on messaging”.
A briefing paper prepared by Tusla on October 22nd said that once a person presenting as an unaccompanied minor is referred to it by the IPO, Tusla is legally required to assume that person is a child.
“As such, each young person must be treated as a child, despite any reservations regarding age, until such time as the claimed age can be verified through an eligibility assessment,” the briefing paper stated. Tusla “does not have the benefit of any objective determination of age assessments”, it noted.
Tusla received 619 referrals to its unaccompanied minors team in 2024, of which 570 were taken into care or accommodated by the agency. This represented a 32 per cent increase on 2023, and brought the total number of unaccompanied minors who needed to be accommodated by Tusla in 2024 to 893. This included children who had arrived alone in Ireland in previous years but remained in care.
Tusla said in the briefing note that it had to commission 20 new accommodation centres for unaccompanied minors in 2024, which increased its residential beds by 128. All of the State accommodation for unaccompanied minors is either provided by NGOs or the private sector.
Tusla said its “main challenges” include the fact that it is currently not able to carry out age assessments, the need for appropriate accommodation and “the need for upscaling to meet increased arrivals”.
“There are challenges in relation to appropriately qualified staff, the location of services, and staff availability,” it said.
“The need for Special Emergency Arrangements to accommodate unaccompanied minors is driven primarily by the volume of arrivals. The global factors affecting this are outside of the control of Tusla and therefore emergency placement requirements are demand-led.”
A spokeswoman for Tusla said it is “standard practice” for the agency to prepare briefings for the department “on matters of policy and practice as they relate to the provision of services and to share with the Department statements drafted from those briefings”.
The Department of Children said it “routinely receives policy briefings from Tusla and, where appropriate, may draw on these briefings when responding to media queries”.
Figures released to Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan show there were 12 cases taken against the Minister of Justice between 2022 and last year in which age verification of unaccompanied minors was “germane”. Fourteen cases are known to have been taken against Tusla on similar grounds between 2021 and last year.
