Missing schoolboy Kyran Durnin (8) was “lost in the system” and the situation “should never have happened”, the Minister for Education Norma Foley has said.
Ms Foley said she would be pursuing “tightening up things” with her counterpart in Northern Ireland when it comes to a child moving school from one jurisdiction to another.
The Fianna Fáil TD added there were “clearly questions to be answered” and she expected a report from Tusla on the case over the coming days.
Gardaí are currently investigating the disappearance and assumed killing of Kyran Durnin.
The last positive sighting of Kyran was at the end of the school year in 2022, when he was aged six. It emerged earlier this month that the boy had been taken out of school at that time, with officials assuming he had moved to a school in Northern Ireland. This meant Kyran’s long-term absence from school went unnoticed by Irish officials.
[ Kyran Durnin case: How can a child go missing for two years?Opens in new window ]
Speaking to reporters at Government buildings on Wednesday, Ms Foley said she had asked the Child and Family Agency, Tusla, for a report on “what has happened up to this point”.
“We need to get to the bottom of it. We need to know what happens if a child moves from one jurisdiction to another, from one country to another, or whatever the case might be,” she said.
“But the bottom line is that there is a child at the centre of this, I think there isn’t a family, there isn’t an individual in the country that isn’t heartbroken by the revelations of the last number of weeks in relation to this young child and no one would envisage that this should be the outcome for any child in this country ... We do want to find out what happened and we do want to ensure that this would never be a reality into the future.”
Ms Foley said currently schools accept the “bona fide” of parents and guardians when they inform them they’re moving their child to another jurisdiction or country.
She said she had “good engagement” with Northern Ireland’s Minister for Education Paul Givan over recent weeks and both could learn what was “best practice from each other”.
“Certainly it’s an area that I’m very keen [to pursue] and I would absolutely have no doubt that Minister Givan will be very happy to engage with me in terms of maybe tightening up things, when [children are] moving from one jurisdiction to another and I certainly would be pursuing that absolutely,” she added.
Separately, the Minister said the terms of reference for the inquiry into historical child sexual abuse in schools would be published in March 2025.
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