Missing 8yr Old Kyran Durnin - presumed dead *READ Mod Note Added to OP*

It's just human survival instinct I suppose.

They don't want to spend 20yrs in prison.

This whole case highlights the lack of safeguarding systems.

There is no means for a school to track a child that has left the jurisdiction to attend school outside the state. If a parent says they are moving their child to Australia we simply have to take them at their word. And while Dundalk is extremely close to the border, moving to Newry for school is similar to moving to the other side of the world. If the school were told he had left the state there is no means of checking on that. Even for children where there were concerns. Children moving to another school in the state are somewhat tracked as school places are now logged on the POD database. Nothing unusual for children moving counties to miss school for many weeks before popping up in a new school.

Schools are rarely informed of concerns held by Tusla unless the school were the ones to report the issue. So a family could be dealing with a social worker but the school and teacher who spend the most time outside of the family with the child are none the wiser or given extremely limited information. So a child moves schools, concerns generally aren’t shared with the new school.

Children under 6 legally don’t have to be at school. So a child could have extremely poor attendance and schools can’t do anything about it.

Once a child turns 6, absences of more than 20 days need to be reported. But nothing at all happens with this information especially if the absences were marked as illness. Even for children with extreme absences (I’m talking children missing more than 50% of days in a year). Court cases are extremely rare.

The child wasn't "involved" with Tusla until the beginning of this year.

Tusla's communications with schools are abysmal. Even if Tusla receives a report a staff member is a suspected child abuser, they wont even tell the school management.

Involved with the family, yes. But they didn't request to meet Kyran until the start of this year. They realised the child they are met was not Kyran when photos of him were published in the media when he was reported missing.

"Kyran is understood to have come on to Tusla’s radar at the beginning of this year. The Child and Family Agency had specific concerns about the family. Although these did not relate directly to Kyran, social workers made inquiries about him.

Tusla requested a face-to-face meeting with the family and with Kyran, according to the source.

After several attempts, the meeting took place in mid-July, with a child who officials understood to be Kyran.

A second face-to-face meeting with the family, and the boy they understood to be Kyran, took place in early August, the source said.

It is understood Tusla planned more engagement with the family.

But on August 29, Kyran’s maternal grandmother went to Tusla to report that her daughter, Dayla, and her grandson, Kyran, had gone missing.
Dayla had left a note that the grandmother found very concerning, the source said.

Tusla advised the grandmother to report her concerns to An Garda Síochána. That day, Tusla separately reported its concerns about the case to gardaí.

The grandmother took Tusla’s advice and the next day, August 30, reported Dayla and Kyran missing to local gardaí.

Gardaí launched a missing persons inquiry and obtained photos of Dayla and Kyran from the family for a planned public appeal for information.

Within a day or two, gardaí had contacted Tusla to discuss the agency’s concerns about the missing mother and child.

Gardaí presented Tusla officials with the photo of Kyran, as provided by the family. According to sources, only then did Tusla realise that the boy in the picture was not the child they met in mid-July and early August."

https://archive.ph/Bz7b0

On the school attendence, I spoke to someone who does these reports yesterday - my wife is a teacher so plenty of contacts.

Schools all used electroni attendance systems - vsware, alaldin etc. The schools dont report on individual kids. An attendance report is generated for the entire school which highlights a the kids who have missed X number of days. Done at the end of each term. The reasons recorded by the school are also included. This automatically goes to Tusla - so its impossible to forget to include an individual kid. Tusla would be fully aware of any attendance issues.

Tulsa were "milking" Covid? The family deceived deliberately, and if anyone "milked" covid, it was them, telling the school the boy was absent for weeks due to having Covid. Should every absence of a child due to covid during the height of covid have been investigated? Where was the army of Tulsa mobilized to do this I wonder?

I really don't get the way a nanny state is absolutely clamoured for in Ireland by some people. What about the neighbours, the community, the family themselves? None of these have any responsibility and it all falls to Tulsa somehow? The government isn't some sainted irish mammy. It's a collection of civil servants, paid like crap, wanting to clock off the second their day is done.

I can think of two painful examples of where societies did exactly this, demanded responsibility for everything (housing, health, police, education etc etc etc) from the government. Soviet Bloc eastern europe, and the Israeli Kibbutz movement. I don't want Ireland to be either of those things.

Serious amounts of deflection here.

It’s now two months since this child was reported “missing” and we’re still in the dark as to his whereabouts. There’s one person who knows exactly what happened and has (apparently) declined to share that info with Gardaí.

That’s the only thing that matters right now.

the amount of people on this thread using his disappearance to grind their axes against the government, the civil service and men is absolutely baffling.

I’m not commenting on the Covid issue but while your point about abdication of family and societal responsibility is a fair one, it can in no way diminish that of Tusla, who are after all paid to take that responsibility.

Yes, it would be good if neighbours looked out for children, but there are a multitude of reasons why that’s never going to be sufficient to prevent harm to some children.

As for families, it grates on me too when parents who have already failed their children complain that Tusla or whoever has done an even worse job - but OTOH the belief that Tusla can do a better job is the very basis of their work, so it’s fair enough really.

Unlike neighbours, it’s their job and they have the necessary authority given to them. So it’s fair criticism when there are massive failings like not even noticing they’re seeing a different child.

Seriously? That’s challenging to you??

Take it logically. How does the child come to your attention when no one has seen him for months? IOW, they’re investigating a missing child. Ascertaining that the right child is being presented is basic stuff I’d have thought.

As for how you then identify the right child: if there’s any doubt after questioning the child himself (it’s not that easy for a child to lie convincingly about this identity), couldn’t they just ask his teacher to confirm?

If a teacher can’t be present at the meeting itself, well, in NI, there are case meetings about children to which teachers, GPs and various other people involved in a child’s care are regularly invited. A photograph of the child who had been shown to the SW could be passed around there. I imagine Tusla has something similar. If they don’t, how do they coordinate anything?

It’s really not hard to find solutions to this - if you actually want to.

You can't "pass around" photos of random children. Honestly, the naivety! Of course this is not acceptable as a solution.

Identifying children is actually trickier than you assume at a national scale. We don't have a national photo ID card in place for children. ( Does any country in Europe? ) I know 18 year olds who never had a passport or a drivers license. Their first id is often student ID.

So? Even if it's an organizational issue is still ridiculous to say social workers want to save kids. Some of them are phoning it in because they can too.

Societal responsibility can't exist when you unpick the fabric of society to the extent that we have over the past few decades.
You can't just deconstruct the family, demolish communities and reduce people to exhausted commuter belt wage slaves, barely present in their own families lives let alone their communities and expect 'society', whatever that is now, to be vigilant. Sure, I couldn't even tell you who my neighbours are at the moment. They're just the people that shuffle out the door in the morning and barely respond with a grunt if you make passing pleasantries on the odd occasion you cross paths on the doorstep.

your “not that hard” solution breaks multiple laws and you still avoided the actual question.

What should the Tusla worker have done differently?