The FOI Files is a series from our team at The Journal Investigates. Each week, one of our investigative journalists brings you inside the fight for information that we’re all entitled to. They’ll share their documents, their stories – and tips on how to take the journey for yourself.

This week’s file is from Acting Editor of The Journal Investigates, Noel Baker.

See here for The Journal Investigates’ most recent investigations.

AN UNUSUAL THING happened recently. A Freedom of Information request provided me with the wrong answer.

I have been a frequent submitter of FOI requests to Tusla over the years. The Child and Family Agency tends to come under regular and intense scrutiny, given its key role in child welfare and protection, and I’ve found that its FOI unit does its best to deliver. 

Back in May, I simply wanted to get a handle on whether Tusla was gaining more foster carers than it was losing. It has been acknowledged in recent years that some children entering the care system are doing so at a later stage than may have been the case previously, and that because of this and other factors, it can make for a more challenging environment for a foster placement. 

It’s not a controversial statement to say that when fostering works, it’s in everyone’s interests, creating a nurturing and stable environment for a child dealing with trauma, ideally setting that young person on the road to a better future. On the most pragmatic level, it is certainly less expensive for the state than a residential care placement or unregulated emergency accommodation. 

The initial response to my FOI request said that there was a net loss of foster carers in the three-year period between 2023 and 2025, inclusive – but what was even more interesting was the number of foster carers ‘statutorily ceased’ or, in effect, removed from fostering because of an allegation.

That figure was 46. Except as it turns out, it wasn’t. 

I sought records on those 46 cases, as I wanted to know whether any of the allegations had been substantiated or upheld, or whether some had subsequently been rejected. Were any of these one-offs? Did they involve multiple incidents? It simply raised a lot of questions.

The ‘overcount’

The response last month took me by surprise. Not only were the records of foster carers who were ‘statutorily ceased’ not centrally collated, but Tusla said the original figures of 46 it had initially provided were wrong – an “overcount”. Yet the actual number was not included. 

This was clearly not the fault of the decision maker, who had taken the time to call me many weeks earlier so we could jointly tweak the wording of my request in order to get it over the line. Yet even that alteration still did not result in the release of records.

The records I sought were the nature of the allegations, whether the allegations were well-founded or not substantiated, and the number of cases in which the gardaí became involved.

My request was subsequently refused as “there is no nationally collated record containing the information sought and a specific breakdown of this data is not currently collated in the format requested.”

Arguably, this is the type of data which Tusla should have to hand. In an era of mandatory reporting, where monthly reports issued by the Child and Family Agency can detail how many child-related concerns were lodged by social workers, teachers, gardaí and sports coaches, Tusla might be expected to know how many foster carers have been effectively struck off. 

Tusla initially said: “In exploring the potential to standardise this data as a national metric going forward, we commenced a validation process.” It was in this context that it uncovered the ‘overcount’, with a pledge to review definitions and reporting of the number.

Yet the correct number of struck-off foster carers still hadn’t materialised weeks after the FOI response revealed the original data was incorrect. 

Individual case files 

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The reason is that the information is held on individual case files and so “it is not possible to extract this data electronically”. As the decision maker explained, “It is not feasible to extract efficiently from individual case files as this would involve an examination and overview which essentially would be the creation of a new record of each of the individual files to extract the data required.”

I should say at this point that the refusal of some other FOI requests by public bodies has rested on exactly this same reason: records that – arguably – should be readily available, which could be centralised, but which are not. 

Reader, I remember all too well the days of paper files. In fact, I’m old enough to remember sending an FOI to the HSE, which at the time was responsible for child welfare and protection, regarding injuries to children in care. I received a huge, unordered stack of paper files, hand-delivered to the office one afternoon, three years after I’d submitted the request. 

I’m also old enough to have visited Tusla’s Dublin office, where its Garda Pulse-style recording system was showcased, with the opinion at the time being that if anything needed recording anywhere in the country to do with children and young people, it would be available at the touch of a button. 

Yet here we are. Some data is reported monthly and in great detail, while other hugely important data is still in individual files, where even a relatively small data set – likely a few dozen cases, in this instance – is not centrally recorded.

It is important to stress here that both Tusla and the body which represents social workers firmly believe that this issue has not resulted in any risk to a child. People can be reassured that the assessment process for foster carers is suitably robust that no one is required to step back from fostering in one part of the country – and can then simply move house and resume fostering somewhere else instead.

And it should be noted that a separate report issued just last month by the Department of Children and referenced in our story also elaborated on the impact of an allegation or complaint on the small number of foster carers who faced them and were ultimately exonerated.

This isn’t a shortcoming of Tusla’s FOI Unit but, for me, a perplexing organisational inability to pull this sort of key information together, to bring it in line with school absenteeism rates, the number of children in residential care, or the number of children in a particular area without an allocated social worker – information that is readily available.

We ran our story because the very lack of precise data, and the related concerns over this, was the story. We know that Tusla has an enormous responsibility and arguably hasn’t always received the support – financial and otherwise – it needs to do the job. 

But at the risk of turning this into a different type of column, it could be argued that it also needs to stop being the story.

If you have a burning FOI question about how to get certain records or why your request was refused, you can get in touch with our team at investigates@thejournal.ie. The Journal Investigates team will be back with another instalment of The FOI Files next Tuesday.