Kitty Holland

From TUSLA to the Public Accounts Committee.

And TUSLA, this is an ongoing issue that the Public Accounts Committee is scrutinising

with Tesla and Tesla say that there's been a big increase in the number of young people being referred to them in the last four or five years.

And about almost 300 of them who said they were children were subsequently found to be adults, you know, after they sort of interrogated the claims and looked into them.

So, I mean, that's the main meat of what they're telling the Public Health Committee.

Yeah, I mean, TUSLA's in this kind of legal sort of quandary, I suppose, or, you know, they're lacking a legislative basis to carry out age assessments properly.

So just to explain, so under the International Protection Act, which is a 2015 piece of legislation, if a person comes into a port of entry and says they're a child or the immigration official believes that they probably are a child and that they're unaccompanied, they must, under the legislation, refer them on to TUSLA.

And under that legislation, TUSLA must give them the benefit of the doubt that they are a child and they must accommodate them.

So TUSLA has to take them, but they don't have a legislative basis on which to carry out age assessments.

So their way around that is that they have a legislative basis

for assessing them for eligibility for their services, which is in effect a test on whether they're under 18 to be eligible for those services.

Yeah, and I'm sure Tesla will be very relieved about that because, you know, that they say that this is an issue of significant risk for them.

I'm sure there could potentially be cases coming their way, you know, down the line if people feel that they were a child who was...

in a child residential centre and an adult was placed in with them, albeit inadvertently, and that there are risks both to inadvertently placing an adult in with children, but also then, which I'm sure your contributor there from Safety Net will talk about, is there's a risk if you put a child inadvertently not believing they're a child and put them in with adults.

So there's risk all over this, you know, and TUSLA is, you know, in the middle of trying to manage that.

And I'm sure they'll be very relieved that Department of Justice and Immigration are going to take this off their hands.

not knowing that they are adults i mean it is a desperately risky situation yeah and you know and some of them are um which is another issue are being placed in these unregulated uninspected placements called special emergency arrangements where there aren't properly qualified staff to supervise you know really vulnerable um traumatized young people and potentially young adults um

So, you know, it's fraught with potential risk.

And, you know, we saw what happened with the murder of Vadim Davydenko last year or the killing of Vadim Davydenko, excuse me, in a special emergency arrangement, which was housing unaccompanied minors.

So, you know, they're potentially very volatile places.