Care Day 2021: ‘Leaving care, it’s not like happy days’

In Ireland there are about 6,000 children currently living with foster families or in residential homes and about 500 leave care each year. Next Friday is the sixth annual Care Day, a celebration of the achievements of children who are in care and those who have left.

This year, Epic (Empowering People in Care), an advocacy organisation for children in the care system, has a week of online events, workshops and webinars planned.

Even before coronavirus, the system already had significant issues. There is an overly high incident of placement breakdown (where children end up moving from one foster or residential home to another), too few overworked social workers and, sometimes, inappropriate placements. “Covid has really just placed a magnifying glass on all of the problems with the system,” says Epic’s new chief executive Marissa Ryan.

Lockdown has meant family visitation has not been possible for many children in the system, and there’s an extra edge of worry for those who were due to move placement or were due to age out of the system (Tusla has promised to extend such placements).

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“They often feel a bit forgotten about and they’re worried that their case has slipped under the radar,” says Ryan. “The level of uncertainty, which already exists for all children in care, is just being exacerbated and causing terrible anxiety.”

Coronavirus challenge

Epic has responded to the coronavirus challenge by extending its usual advocacy services with a free legal advice clinic (in partnership with Community Law and Mediation in Coolock). It is also tackling digital poverty by providing college-going care-leavers with laptops and other devices (thanks to additional coronavirus emergency funding) and continuing to reach out to the many care-leavers who are living alone without family networks of support.

Epic would ultimately like to see the remit for aftercare extended to age 26 (it currently extends to 21 or 23 for those in education). Even as things stand, the quality of aftercare services differs by geography and unacceptably high numbers of young care-leavers end up homeless or in addiction.

The biggest problem for the care system, Ryan believes, is a lack of information. Despite all of the State’s recent openness about historical neglect and abuse of children in care, she says, there’s very little actual data collected on how we’re doing now.

“The Ryan report in 2009 recommended that the government had to prioritise a longitudinal study on children and young people in care and leaving care, and it still hasn’t been acted upon. The mother and baby homes report is the sixth report on the situation of children in State and religious-run care.

“None of these reports will have value or merit unless the recommendations are acted on. We can’t have an informed care system that acts in the best interest of the child, if we don’t understand the actual issues affecting children throughout the course of their time in care . . . If you compare us to the UK, for example, they have massively invested in genuine research and data collection . . . [They] are able to put in place specific programmes to address the gaps that children in care are facing . . .

“No one in the Irish Government at this point has any information on the educational outcomes for children in care, either in primary, secondary, post-leaving cert or third level . . . We don’t know what we’re doing or how we’re doing.”

For Ryan, given our nation’s terrible history with vulnerable children, we should be aspiring to a care system that we can be proud of. After all, the Irish State is their corporate parent so these children are our children. “[They] are so courageous and so resilient and driven and have done things that I would never have been equipped to do,” she says.

“Care Day celebrates the lived experience of young people in care and give them a chance to say, for better or worse, ‘care has been the pathway I’ve gone through in my life and these are the issues that I want to talk about’ . . . They really deserve to be championed and to have the political system behind them. I just think they’re extraordinary.”

Jasmine’s story: ‘During Covid a lot of us are supporting each other’

Jasmine Mooney, 23, a member of Epic’s youth council

I first met Jasmine three years ago when she was living in Focus Ireland’s aftercare homeless accommodation. She’s now 23. She has been working as a social care worker and is living with her partner and new baby and also has a nine-year-old step-son.

“I’ll give my kids the best future. I’ll never let them go through what I went through. My attitude to life now is that it’s all about the positivity.”

Jasmine was taken into care at the age of 11 and had a mixed experience of the system. Though she experienced placements breaking down, she also speaks with gratitude about the kind staff members in her final residential home “who gave me hope”, especially one man who was in the care system himself as a child.

“Leaving care, it’s not like ‘happy days!’. You’re on your own . . . You don’t have that mammy and daddy that you can go to for support . . . So you have to look for another option that can be like a family to you. Epic is a powerful group of care-leavers that come together and understand each other. You feel at home like you’re not the only crazy one . . .

“[During Covid] a lot of us are supporting each other, being there for one another. Trying our best to send little notes to their door saying, ‘You’re doing great’.” Her own outlet is usually music. “Anything in my life experience I put down on paper and I try rapping a beat to it.” She laughs. “I sing to the baby now.”

Last year, with Epic’s help, Jasmine requested her care files through the Freedom of Information Act. “I was becoming a mother myself, and I wanted to go back and reflect on my own life. I knew why I was in care. My ma couldn’t take care of me. But I wanted to go deeper into it. I remembered things and wanted to go back there. ‘Was it my fault?’ But none of it is my fault.”

What was it like to read the files? “A lot of it was blanked out . . . [One report] might say, ‘Jasmine had a great day but an incident happened between Jasmine and ‘blank’. And this conversation happened on access with ‘blank’ and Jasmine’s ma said ‘blank blank’.’

“I’m trying to piece together the puzzle . . . I’m thinking, ‘What happened that day? What exactly was said? Did something important happen that day that I need to know about?’

“Then you go back to Freedom of Information, asking for more detail on it. And they come back saying, ‘You can’t get it’, which is wrong because I think every young person should have all the details of what happened to them during their life in care. I had around 20 files and they only gave me five of them . . . You want closure from it but you don’t get that closure.”

Jasmine knows that some children in the system aren’t as capable as she is of fighting her corner which is why she is involved with Epic. “At the end of the day we are the Government’s kids, so for them to throw us away at the age of 18 is wrong.”

Rory’s story: ‘We were just kind of taken from the home’

Rory Brown, 21, a member of Epic’s youth council

Rory was seven when he was taken into care. He remembers the day clearly. “We were just coming from school and it was just before Christmas . . . We were just kind of taken from the home. There were loads of guards around and there was a big scene made about it.

“Looking back now, you’d wonder why but it was the talk of the village. There was no time to pack bags. We just had our little rucksacks . . . We didn’t really understand what was happening. We were just told we were going on a holiday for a few days . . .

“It’s something I still think about . . . It’s upsetting because you’re moving away from your mother . . . We didn’t get time to say goodbye because we thought, ‘we’ll be back in a day or two’.”

Rory had a relatively positive experience of the system. He and his brother stayed with the same foster family for 11 years and his sisters lived nearby for much of that. He currently lives with his grandparents and aunt and is in his final year studying primary teaching at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.

He discovered Epic in his college years. He wants to improve things for young people who are still inside the system. There’s still a stigma, he says. He recalls other children telling him that his mother didn’t love him or that he wasn’t good enough.

He thinks it’s very important that stereotypes are squashed. “I had very caring foster parents who allowed us know if we wanted to talk, they were always there for us. And I think a big thing about overcoming that trauma was the teachers in the primary school were very good at keeping us distracted . . . They took the time to care and took the time to make sure we were okay.

“Whenever people ask me why I became a teacher, that’s one of my reasons. It was because of those experiences with teachers caring. I want to be able to do that.”

For more information about Care Day go to careday.org