23/08/2026
When a child dies in State care, knowing how many should not be too much to ask.
The front page of today’s Irish Sun is difficult to look at.
“State agency has no idea how 16 youngsters died since 2024.”
Behind that headline are 16 young people.
Sixteen individual lives. Sixteen stories. Sixteen children or young people who, for one reason or another, had reached a point where the State had a responsibility for their care.
As a psychotherapist working with children, adolescents and families, what troubles me is not only the number. It is what stories like this say about how we understand and respond to some of our most vulnerable young people.
Children who enter care do not leave their experiences at the door.
Many have already experienced significant disruption — neglect, abuse, bereavement, parental addiction or mental health difficulties, domestic conflict, repeated moves, fractured attachments, school difficulties, rejection or simply the experience of never feeling completely safe.
And trauma does not always look like sadness.
Sometimes it looks like anger.
Sometimes aggression.
Sometimes running away.
Sometimes substance use.
Sometimes refusing help.
Sometimes risk-taking, self-destruction or pushing away every adult who tries to get close.
It can be very easy to label a young person as difficult, defiant, manipulative, challenging or non-compliant.
But in therapy, I often find myself asking a different question:
“What happened to this young person?” rather than “What is wrong with them?”
A young person who has learned that adults disappear, relationships are unsafe or home can become frightening may not suddenly trust simply because a new adult is kind to them.
Trust has to be earned.
Safety has to be experienced repeatedly.
Relationships have to survive the difficult behaviour.
And sometimes the young person who appears to reject help most fiercely is the young person who has learned most painfully not to depend on anybody.
This is why trauma-informed care cannot simply be a phrase in a policy document.
It requires consistent adults, stable placements, adequately supported foster carers and residential staff, access to appropriate mental-health and therapeutic services, good communication between agencies, proper oversight and continuity of relationships.
Most importantly, it requires us to meet the young person where they actually are — not where the system would find it more convenient for them to be.
There are extraordinarily committed social workers, foster carers, residential staff, therapists, teachers and family-support workers doing this work every day, often within systems under enormous pressure. This is not about blaming individual professionals.
But when vulnerable young people die while in the care of the State, scrutiny is necessary.
We should want to understand what happened.
We should want accurate information.
We should want to know whether anything could have been done differently.
And we should be willing to learn from every one of those young lives.
Because children in care deserve more than somewhere to stay.
They deserve safety, connection, consistency, compassion and adults who remain curious about the pain underneath the behaviour.
Every statistic on that front page was somebody’s child.
And every one of them mattered.
