‘It’s a reality that you have to pay for things’: foster carers call for support

Foster carers have called on the Government to ease the financial pressures placed on those providing care to children, noting that the allowance given to foster families has not risen since 2009.

In a series of pre-budget submissions made to the Government, the Irish Foster Care Association (IFCA) said that there was an “urgent need” to raise the foster care allowance to at least €500 per child weekly, to allow for increases in inflation since 2009.

The current rate is €325 per week for children under 12 years, and €352 for children 12 years and older.

“Foster carers are looking for recognition, for the important place that they hold in the Irish care system,” Róisín Clarke, chief executive of IFCA, said on Wednesday, standing outside Leinster House.

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Quentin Comerford, a foster carer from south Dublin, said that, despite the rewarding nature of fostering, the fostering community has felt “ignored” by successive governments.

“Nobody who is fostering is in it for the money,” he said, standing at the gates to Leinster House on Wednesday afternoon. “The finances are secondary, really, but it’s a reality that you have to pay for things.”

Niamh Raymond, a foster carer from Co Kildare, gave up a job with the HSE to care full-time. “I still have to survive, I still have a mortgage . . . you’re not doing it for money, but you need money to survive, to look after these children.”

Foster carers, for example, are often left to foot the bill when it comes to driving children to appointments, visits with family members and therapy sessions. Under the current framework, carers are expected to cover the first 150km of travel, despite the obligations of the State to children in care.

[ Three-quarters of carers ‘would not recommend fostering’ ]

“You will rarely find someone who will complain about it, but it is a reality that we are subsidising State care,” Mr Comerford, who has been a foster carer for 11 years, said. In its pre-budget submissions to the Department of Children and the Department of Social Protection, IFCA has also asked for a revision of rules around mileage expenses.

The number of foster families in Ireland is falling, according to figures provided by IFCA – at the end of January 2023, there were approved 3,914 foster carers registered in Ireland, down from 4,384 carers in 2017.

Residential care placements provided by the State costs, on average, considerably more than a placement with a foster family – €306,624 annually for the former, €16,896 the latter.

Mr Comerford said that the best recruiter of fosters carers are other carers. “[But] it’s not really encouraging to other people who are considering being foster carers . . . when [carers] are being ignored.”

Mr Comerford agreed that fewer carers leads to more children in residential care, and in turn, substandard living environments. “Children tend to get much better care in a foster family and a family environment. They grow up in a nice friendly house, rather than a residential institution,” he said.

“It’s not to get money for us foster carers, it’s so that we can support the foster children we have, and that it’s possible for more foster families to do the fostering because it’s so desperately needed,” Roseanne McCullig, a foster carer from Co Kildare, said on Wednesday.

“These are children’s lives, and a delay of six months, a year, a few weeks sometimes, for a child to be able to get a placement, that can [cause] lifelong harm to them, depending on the situation they’re coming from,” said Ms McCullig, who started fostering in 2020.

Wider issues within the social care system were also highlighted by carers on Wednesday. A lack of resourcing within Tusla, the State’s child and family agency, as well as the placement of children in “unregulated and inadequate” accommodation – hotels and B&Bs, for example – add to the difficulties at hand.

“I think we need to keep in context that if a child comes into care, that child has experienced adverse circumstances, and placement in a B&B or a hotel is not good enough. A foster home is the best placement,” Ms Clarke said.

“What we need to do is make sure that our current cohort of foster carers are taken care of, that they are facilitated to provide that absolutely crucial service that they provide to the State, in opening their homes to children who need that home environment,” she added.

IFCA have made a series of other proposals to the Government ahead of October’s budget, including calls for foster parents to be deemed eligible for back-to-school allowances, and provisions to cover the costs of new placements with foster families.

The advocacy group is also seeking for “anomalies” in pension contributions for foster carers to be addressed. The IFCA reasons that because foster carers often give up employment to provide care for children full-time, their investment of time should count towards the State’s contributory pension system.