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. 

This article from the Irish Times calls attention to a new report from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Investigation, highlighting how "thousands of Irish babies were put up for adoption for all the wrong reasons."

Ireland's Child Care Law Reporting Project (CCLRP) has published a collection of 48 cases underscoring the severe impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on vulnerable children, according to this article from the Irish Times.

"Ireland has again been brought face-to-face with its cold and callous past with the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes revealing stories of cruelty, emotional abuse and soaring infant death rates in a series of State- and religious-run institutions," says this article from the Irish Times.

"The Irish government is to apologise after an investigation found an 'appalling level of infant mortality' in the country's mother-and-baby homes," according to this article from BBC News.

This article from the Gazette Desk highlights findings from the annual report of the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection in Ireland, Dr Conor O’Mahony, which "examines both court care orders and voluntary care arrangements for children and notes that court reviews by a judge have the effect of making sure that things are done for a child in care, with more defined plans."

This paper presents a potentially fruitful theoretical framework for examining the transition out of state care.

This article reports on the use of a suite of validated instruments to measure the impact of services on children and their parents in receipt of services provided by an Irish Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) across their seven family centres.