Thousands of children across Ireland are still waiting for an initial appointment with a Child Disability Network Team, with families in North and South Tipperary among those affected by long delays.
HSE figures show that 8,200 children were on waiting lists for first contact with a CDNT at the end of March, including 5,261 children who had been waiting for more than 12 months. The overall figure marks a fall from 8,648 children recorded at the end of 2025.
The figures show that Tipperary is split across two HSE regions, meaning waiting-list pressures affecting families in the county are recorded under separate regional totals.
North Tipperary falls within HSE Mid West, which also covers Clare and Limerick. In that region, 1,109 children were awaiting first contact with a CDNT, including 599 children who had been waiting for more than a year.
South Tipperary is counted within HSE Dublin and South East, alongside Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wexford, most of Wicklow and parts of South Dublin. That region had the second-largest waiting list nationally, with 2,078 children awaiting first contact. Of those, 1,432 children had been waiting longer than 12 months. The split means there is no single headline waiting-list figure for Tipperary in the regional data, despite children in both the north and south of the county being affected by delays.
Nationally, HSE Dublin Midlands had the largest waiting list, with 2,252 children awaiting first contact. Of these, 1,669 had been waiting longer than a year. The area includes Dublin South City and West, Dublin South West, Kildare, West Wicklow, Laois, Offaly, Longford and Westmeath. HSE Dublin North East recorded 1,908 children waiting for first contact, with 1,269 waiting over a year. The region includes North Dublin, Louth, Meath, Monaghan and most of Cavan.
HSE West and North West, covering Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, West Cavan, Mayo, Galway and Roscommon, had 452 children awaiting contact, while HSE South West, covering Cork and Kerry, had 401 children on waiting lists. The figures come amid continuing staffing pressures across CDNT services. A report showed that, as of October 2025, the vacancy rate across CDNT posts stood at 18%, with 457 positions unfilled.
The HSE is the lead agency for 43 of the country’s 93 CDNTs. Enable Ireland operates 20 teams, while Brothers of Charity provides six. Among providers, Enable Ireland had funding for 502.3 whole-time equivalent posts, with 85% filled. Brothers of Charity had 208.9 funded whole-time equivalent posts, with 89% filled. The highest vacancy rate was recorded in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, where 54% of posts were vacant. Gorey in Co Wexford and Waterford North City each had vacancy rates of 52%.
At regional level, Dublin and South East had the highest vacancy rate, with one quarter of posts unfilled. Occupational therapy posts remain under pressure, with 27% vacant, equivalent to 40.9 unfilled positions. Clinical psychology vacancies were also high, with 44% of posts unfilled, or 41.6 vacancies. There are 93 Child Disability Network Teams aligned with 96 Community Healthcare Networks nationwide. The teams provide services and supports for children and young people from birth to 18 years of age.
History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes in the ways hatred is excused, renamed, or redirected.
In the autumn of 1941, a ravine on the edge of Kyiv became one of the most devastating killing sites of the Holocaust. German forces had occupied the city on September 19th, and within days the Nazi campaign of persecution turned into mass murder. Notices appeared ordering Kyiv’s Jews to report with documents, clothing, money, and valuables. Many believed they were being deported or resettled. Instead, they were being led to Babi Yar.
On September 29th and 30th, Jewish families moved through the city in long, fearful columns. Parents carried children. Elderly people walked beside relatives. Others brought small bundles containing whatever remained of their lives. At the ravine, they were stripped of their possessions and clothing, forced toward the edge in groups, and shot. In only two days, 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered there, making Babi Yar one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
Section of bodies photographed at the mass grave in Babi Yar, Ukraine, by Soviet researchers, three years later in 1944.
The killing did not end with those two days. During the Nazi occupation, Babi Yar continued to be used as an execution site. Jews who had survived or hidden were later brought there and killed. Soviet prisoners of war, Roma people, resistance members, civilians, and others targeted by the occupiers were also murdered in or near the ravine. What had once been a natural landmark became a mass grave and a symbol of the “Holocaust by bullets,” the campaign of open-air shootings carried out across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
After the war, Babi Yar’s memory was itself subjected to silence. Under Soviet rule, public commemoration often avoided naming the Jewish victims specifically, presenting the dead mainly as Soviet citizens. For survivors, relatives, and historians, this omission deepened the wound. The ravine held not only the bodies of the murdered but also a history that official memory struggled to acknowledge.
Soviet POWs being used by Germany to cover the mass grave after the massacre, on October 1st 1941. Pic: Johannes Hähle.
Today, Babi Yar stands as a place of mourning and warning. Its story reveals how quickly ordinary streets can become routes to destruction when hatred is organised by the state and human beings are reduced to targets. Behind the number 33,771 were families, neighbours, children, workers, students, grandparents, and entire communities whose lives were ended together at the edge of a ravine. To remember Babi Yar is to restore their humanity against the machinery that tried to erase them.
That silence also speaks to the present. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes in the ways hatred is excused, renamed, or redirected. Anti-Semitism rarely begins with violence at the edge of a ravine. It begins with language that turns Jews into a collective blame, with suspicion cast over Jewish identity, with the idea that Jewish fear is exaggerated, or that hostility toward Jews can be justified by events elsewhere. In Ireland today, where public feeling about Israel and Gaza is often intense, there must still be a clear moral line; criticism of any government is legitimate, but blaming Irish Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, intimidating Jewish people, distorting Holocaust memory, or treating Jewish belonging as conditional is antisemitism.
To remember Babi Yar is therefore not only to look back at 1941, but to ask what kind of society we are becoming now. The lesson is not that today is the same as then; it is that dehumanisation must be challenged long before it becomes catastrophe. A country can defend Palestinian lives and rights while also defending Jewish safety, dignity, memory, and belonging.
The measure of moral seriousness is whether we can hold both truths at once, refusing to let grief for one people become hatred of another.
We learn that the Government is preparing to introduce a new Derelict Property Tax across 107 cities and towns, with plans to expand it further to 171 locations.
The stated aim is to bring long-term derelict buildings back into use, restore communities and create more homes. On paper, few people would disagree with that goal. Dereliction is a blight on towns, villages and city streets across Ireland and here in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, one only has to look at the Munster Hotel on Cathedral street, to fully understand the negligence in fulfilling same obligation.
Munster Hotel, Thurles, Co. Tipperary.
But there is a bigger question here: how much more can people and property owners be taxed before Government admits that taxation has become its default answer to every problem? We already have property taxes, vacant property measures, levies, charges, stamp duty, planning costs, compliance costs and endless layers of bureaucracy. Now, once again, the solution being offered is yet another tax.
The new Derelict Property Tax will replace the current Derelict Sites Levy, which is charged at 7% of the market value of a property, and the new rate is expected not to be lower. In other words, this is not a light-touch measure. It is another significant financial burden, this time once again to be administered by Revenue.
Munster Hotel, Thurles, Co. Tipperary.
Of course, owners who deliberately allow buildings to rot, while communities suffer should be held accountable. No one wants to see usable homes and buildings left idle during a housing crisis. But the Government must also recognise that not every derelict property is being held by a wealthy investor or speculator. Some are tied up in probate, in legal disputes, planning delays, lack of services, structural costs, family circumstances or impossible refurbishment expenses.
Punishing everyone with another tax risks missing the real issue. Ireland does not need a Government that simply keeps finding new things to tax. It needs a Government that removes barriers, speeds up planning, supports realistic refurbishment, cuts red tape and makes it financially possible to bring properties back into use. Success should not be measured by how much money Revenue collects. It should be measured by how many buildings are restored, how many homes are created and how many communities are revived.
If this tax becomes just another revenue stream, then it will be another example of a Government that taxes first and solves later.
Most significant reform of Irish asylum laws in the history of the State.
Gives effect to the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, which commences today across Member States.
Co-ordination across the EU, shorter processing times for applications, and reduced time spent in IPAS accommodation.
The Irish Government welcomes the commencement of the International Protection Act 2026 today, 12th June 2026.
The legislation represents the most significant reform of Irish asylum laws in the history of the State and gives effect to the EU Migration and Asylum Pact. The objective of the Act is to provide a fair, sustainable and efficient asylum procedure that is consistent with how asylum laws operate across the EU.
Under the Act, upon arrival in the State, applicants will be required to go through screening, which will involve enhanced security and identity checks and the taking of biometric data. The Act also provides for faster processing, including an accelerated Border Procedure for some applicants, where all decisions and appeals will be concluded within three months.
The Border Procedure will apply to applicants from countries where the proportion of decisions granting international protection is 20% or lower. It can also be used for applicants who are known to have misled authorities or to have destroyed or disposed of an identity or travel document. A new State body, the Tribunal for Asylum and Returns Appeals, TARA, will have responsibility for appeals, while the removal and deportations process will be faster and less bureaucratic.
The Government has stated:“Ireland must have a rules-based immigration system. Today, the commencement of the International Protection Act 2026 marks an important milestone in ensuring the integrity and efficiency of the asylum process, and further building public confidence in the system. This historic reform recognises that migration is a challenge not just at a national level but at a European level. Agreeing migration and asylum policy at an EU level means coordinated actions including sharing of information, reducing the number of people applying for protection in numerous EU countries and reviving the return of applicants to the first country they applied in.
The Government sincerely thanks the officials across the Department and across government for their committed work in delivering this Programme for Government commitment.” Decision-making under the Act will be faster, meaning successful applicants will be granted international protection sooner, and those whose applications are refused can be returned to their country of origin sooner. Faster processing will result in increased savings to the Exchequer, with applicants spending less time in the international protection process and in accommodation. Government has also today appointed Her Honour Judge Karen Fergus as Interim Chief Inspector of Border Procedures to monitor compliance with fundamental human rights in the asylum Border Procedure. Her Honour Judge Fergus is a retired Judge of the Circuit Court.“
On the commencement of the International Protection Act, Government said:“The International Protection Act is a much needed, radical reform of international protection in this country and will vastly improve efficiencies in the system. The faster processing under these new rules will mean that accommodation requirements and costs will reduce in the years ahead.”
Government has also today announced the introduction of an accommodation requirement for those seeking to have their family join them in the State. These changes will take effect from today, June 12th. General Employment Permit holders and other Category C sponsors will be required to provide supporting documentation to demonstrate that they are in a position to accommodate their joining family members, while all sponsors will be ineligible if they are in certain supported accommodation.
The financial thresholds for Irish citizens applying to be joined by spouses and children are also increasing from today. A sponsor must now show a gross income over three years of €75,000, or €25,000 per year. This is an increase from €40,000, or €13,333 per year. Other financial thresholds will increase in line with indexation.
People granted international protection status will also now be required to wait two years from the date they were granted protection before becoming eligible to apply for family reunification under the new Act. Applicants must also meet a number of additional requirements, including demonstrating that the sponsor has sufficient financial resources to support family members without placing an undue burden on the State.
There are certain exceptions where the sponsor is a minor. In addition, the sponsor must not be in receipt of certain social protection payments or housing supports and must not owe a debt to the State for a defined period prior to submitting an application.
Commenting on these new measures, Government stated:“Family reunification remains an important part of our immigration system, and these changes are intended to ensure that the policy continues to operate in a fair, transparent and sustainable manner. The revised policy strengthens accommodation and financial requirements for sponsors, providing greater clarity for applicants, while ensuring that those seeking family reunification are able to support those joining them.”
Ms Cindy Carroll has been announced as the first Chief Appeals Officer to the Tribunal for Asylum and Returns Appeals (TARA). TARA will manage International Protection appeals under the International Protection Act 2026 from June 12th 2026 onwards. The appointment will take effect from that date and will be for a 5-year period.
Ms Carroll has been recommended by ”publicjobs‘, following an open competition as required under legislation. There will be a period during which both TARA and the current appeals body, the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), will operate simultaneously under separate legislative frameworks. As appeals under the 2015 International Protection legislation are progressed, IPAT will be wound down over time. All appeals made from June 12th under the International Protection Act 2026 will be dealt with by TARA.
Ms Carroll is a graduate of Law from University College Cork who was called to the Bar of Ireland in 1995. She practised as a barrister in Cork, and lectured in Cork Institute of Technology and University College Cork. This new role will be vital to the success of the new International Protection Appeals body. In 2001, Ms Carroll was appointed as Advisory Counsel Grade III in the Office of the Attorney General and worked there advising primarily on asylum and immigration law. She returned to the Bar in Dublin in early 2004 and was briefed as counsel on the State Asylum and Immigration Panel from 2004 until March 2018. In March 2018, she was appointed as Deputy Chairperson in the International Protection Appeals Tribunal, where she was head of Training and a decision maker on various types of appeals.
As part of the preparations for the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, Ms Carroll was appointed as an acting Principal Officer in the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration in July 2025 following an internal competition. This role has involved leading on the establishment of the new appeals body. In addition to her legal qualifications, Ms Carroll also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Public Management and an MA in Leadership and Strategy.
Her appointment marks an important step in the establishment of TARA and the ongoing reform of Ireland’s international protection appeals system.
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