The Dublin Metropolitan District Court has described the Child and Family Agency’s failure to return cases to court when children under care orders went without allocated social workers as an “extraordinary failure” affecting around 250 children across Dublin.
In a decision delivered on 11 March 2025, Judge Conor Fottrell said the court’s directions required cases to be brought back when a child had no allocated social worker for a period of about four weeks. The directions had been included in care orders for 15 years, the judgment says. The court’s account covers the period from February 2024 to March 2025 and does not name any parents or children.
The court first learned of the problem during a welfare review in January 2024. A list received the following month identified 160 children in one social work department who lacked an allocated worker. Some had been unallocated since May 2022. In June 2024, the court was told of another 85 cases in a second department. The judgment gives examples of cases in which children had been without a worker since 2019 without being returned to court.
The Agency cited a national shortage of social workers and rising referrals. According to the judgment, local and regional managers knew of the issue by November 2022, and the chief executive said she had known of it in December that year in her previous role. She accepted that it should have been escalated to the executive management team and board. The Agency accepted that it should have returned the cases to court and apologised. It said no active decision had been made not to do so.
In July 2024, the court directed the Agency to review care-order cases for further breaches, update care plans to record when children became unallocated, and notify foster carers. In February 2025, the court said the amended care plans did not clearly record when each child lost an allocated worker and said it would not approve them. The Agency considered its amendments sufficient.
The judge decided to send a letter to each child concerned, to be placed on their social work file and copied to their Guardian ad Litem. In March 2025, the Agency reported that it had reviewed 617 cases and recorded 666 further directions with which it had not complied. The judgment said a further 554 cases remained to be reviewed. The court awaited updates and said cases that remained unallocated would stay under review as necessary. This decision records the court’s directions and response; it does not state that the outstanding reviews were complete.