Asylum seekers – unaccompanied children

Sir, – Not mentioned in the article “Officials concerned about adult asylum seekers claiming to be minors” (News, August 27th) (and presumably neither in the Department of Children’s internal briefing) is that many unaccompanied children spend months living in adult International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) accommodation awaiting an appointment with Tusla social workers to determine whether the agency will take them into care. In most cases, these children wait several months, even over a year, and often having submitted documentary proof of their age, before being rightfully recognised as children by the State and having their rights as children belatedly recognised. These children are among a rising number of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum across the EU, broadly in line with the increased numbers of asylum applications generally.

The impact on a child of being incorrectly assessed as an adult is devastating. Children, 16 and 17 years old, and sometimes as young as 15, are living without a parent or guardian in adult IPAS accommodation. As well as being stressful and confusing for a child, there are huge child protection risks. They do not have the support of a social worker. They lose out on access to secondary level education. In the current context, where adult males are being left without accommodation by the State, children have been left on the street for extended periods, as shown in a High Court decision last April.

Unfortunately, Tusla does not collect statistics on the number of children who are taken into care after being initially, incorrectly, assessed as adults. One of Irish Refugee Council’s caseworkers who regularly works with “age-disputed minors”, as this cohort is known, has supported 18 such young people, primarily from Afghanistan and Somalia, since the beginning of 2023. Of those 18, all but two were accepted as children and taken into Tusla care after several months of living among adults who were neither related nor known to them. The remaining two, despite significant evidence to the contrary, were forced to come to terms with the State’s assessment that they are “adults”. They never had their rights as children in Ireland realised, and lost the right to reunify with their parents and minor siblings.

While assessing age is not an exact science and never can be, it is clear that children are being let down by the Agency which purports to protect them. Unaccompanied minors are some of the most vulnerable people in our society, often having experienced traumatic events before and since leaving their home countries, including family bereavements, violence and sexual exploitation.