Northern Ireland’s Children’s commissioner has expressed “great concern” about the lack of progress on mental health services for vulnerable children after figures revealed that up to 17 looked after children died over the past five years.

This BBC news article details the emotional and psychological abuse discovered during the public inquiry into historical institutional abuse in the Church and state-run institutions for children in Northern Ireland.

A “destroyer of lives”. That is what a nun called adoption rights activist Susan Lohan when she sought answers from the religious order that brokered her adoption. Instead of being given the truth, Lohan was told not to ask questions. She was born in 1964 to one of thousands of unmarried mothers forcibly separated from their children – usually women who had no choice but adoption due to their circumstances.

It is starting to be recognised that young people with mental health and/or intellectual disabilities making the transition to adulthood from out-of-home care require focused attention to understand their needs and service requirements. Within the UK jurisdiction of Northern Ireland (NI), young people with mental health and/or intellectual disabilities are over-represented in the population of care leavers and yet very little is known about their specific needs. The overall aim of the study reported here was to examine the profile of care leavers with mental health and/or intellectual disabilities in order to better inform how best to configure child and adult service systems to meet their transitional needs.

This conference, hosted by Tearfund Ireland, will explore the topic of Care Reform and why volunteering in orphanages is changing. 

This paper suggests a new framework, Trauma-informed Foster Care that was developed to reflect the experience of the Irish foster care system, may be helpful to support more collaborative practices between foster carers and social workers in an Irish context.

"One-third of foster carers have said that a lack of structure for their foster children during the Covid-19 pandemic has been a challenge, according to a new survey," says this article from the Irish Times.

This article explores evidence which shows that the use of ‘private family arrangements’ is motivated partly by a concern for subsidiarity, and partly by necessity: they provide a source of placements in cases where regulatory requirements and a lack of resources would otherwise make the placement challenging or impossible.

"A new free legal advice clinic for children and young people in the care system commenced on Tuesday," says this article from the Irish Times.

"The pandemic has had an adverse impact on all children. That has been more severe for those with special needs but an almost forgotten group of especially vulnerable children are those who experience abuse and neglect," says this Irish Times in this editorial.