The windows of the last known residence of Kyran Durnin, located within the Castletown region of Dundalk in Co Louth, were found obscured by grey draperies on a recent Thursday morning. The building forms part of a continuous row of red-bricked houses on Emer Terrace. At the back, excavations could be distinctly heard as diggers painstakingly scoured the wasteland for any leads on the young boy from Drogheda who was last seen alive in 2022 when he was only six years old. The machinery pulled aside later that Thursday afternoon upon the Gardai failing to discover any trace of the lad.
The community’s response, from the few who chose to engage with the press, comprised mainly of confusion. A local youth, with a clear view of the excavation site from his domicile at Fr Murray Park, expressed his shock at the unfolding story. He admitted to never having interacted with the boy or his family, only becoming familiar with them through the unfolding tragedy and remarked on its chilling nature. Similar sentiments resonated amongst others in the area.
The surrounding narrative baffled most. How could a child vanish for a couple of years with no apparent detection? Wasn’t his lack of appearance at celebrations or during festive seasons, such as Christmas, unmissed? How come the educational institution failed to spot his absence? Did he participate in local sports or belonged to scouts? If Tusla, the national agency for child and family, was aware of his family, why didn’t they acknowledge his absence?
On Thursday, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris labeled the incident as “extraordinary,” claiming it was unlike anything he had experienced in over four decades of law enforcement.
Kyran Durnin was reported missing alongside his 24-year-old mother, Dayla Durnin, in late August by a family member. However, a pursuit for further intel, initiated on the 4th of September, was concluded by the Gardai last week when they managed to locate and speak to Ms. Durnin in the UK. Upon finding no signs indicating her son’s survival, the investigation was swiftly reclassified as a potential homicide case.
Ms Durnin, who is also the mother to two younger children, has spent a significant portion of her recent past in England. She now finds herself in contact with Gardai members in charge of the case.
Tanya Ward, CEO of the Children’s Rights Alliance, expresses that the situation involving Kyran underscores serious issues. It scrutinises not only how Kyran interacted with State services, specifically in areas of education and child safety, but whether different children might find themselves lost in the same system loopholes that seemed to have eluded Kyran.
Ward laments, “Could it be that all procedures were correctly followed? What exactly transpired? Was someone at fault? Are the systems in place riddled with gaps? We are still unaware of what exactly happened in this instance.”
Kyran was last accounted for as a senior infant at the national school in St Nicholas’s Monastery, a stone’s throw away from Emer Terrace. Supposedly, the school received information about his intended transfer to a Northern Irish school in September 2022. However, there seems to have been no follow-up to confirm the implementation of this move.
An official from Tusla, the agency running the Education Welfare Service (EWS) in charge of monitoring school attendance, detailed the process initiated when the service gets a referral for a ‘missing in education’ situation. Accordingly, such a scenario refers to a child leaving school without providing the requisite notification of re-registration elsewhere. In these cases, the EWS is tasked with tracking the child and ensuring they continue to receive education.
There was no response from Tusla regarding who would make such a notification or how a parent opting to transfer the child to another state’s jurisdiction might impact EWS enquiries.
St Nicholas’s Monastery school refrained from commenting on the matter, emphasising its affiliation with an active Garda investigation.
In light of the matter, Niamh Murray, head of Rutland national school in Dublin, echoes her long-standing worries about the flaws in the systems meant to guarantee children’s enrolment in schools and their continuous education upon switching schools or pursuing education at home.
She declares, “There are numerous inconsistencies and loopholes scattered across the system.” According to her, post a school transfer, the new school should proactively communicate this transition to the previous school, enabling the latter to update their records accordingly.
Several years ago, a child of ours left the school without any notification or correspondence from a subsequent education provider. The situation left us anxious, with doubts about whether the child remained within national borders. After raising the matter with Tusla, the child protection agency, we were told nothing could be done. The suggestion of scrutinising child benefit claims to track the child was declined, as the restrictive GDPR policies, set forth by the EU to safeguard personal privacy, prevents access to the benefit system controlled by the Department of Social Protection. Up to this day, the child’s fate remains unknown and a worry.
Fears are raised for children, potentially non-native to Ireland, who aren’t registered at any school. What occupies their entire day? Alarming possibilities such as human trafficking cannot be dismissed. There are cases of known children placed in emergency accommodation or not attending school for over a year. Concern is also raised about young children, mostly four and five-year-olds in junior infants, who frequently miss school. As they are beneath the age of six, the Education Act does not cover these children mandatorily, with it calling for compulsory attendance only for ages six to16.
Thus, situations like these lead to a referral back from Tusla, saying there’s nothing they can do. If children are present in school, tracking and protection can be ensured. Most importantly, the utmost vulnerable children require school the most. This necessitates the formation of a national database, using children’s PPS numbers, that keeps tracks of every child in the country’s educational system.
The Department of Education noted it utilizes online databases to monitor student enrolment at both primary and post-primary levels. These systems are updated at the school level, with a mandate requiring that when a child moves schools, the record on the relevant database is updated.
Though Kyran was not under Tusla’s custody, engagement with him and his family were carried out by the agency. The Garda were alerted at the end of August about their concerns for his safety.
Historic instances of children falling subject to systemic failures have highlighted the communication and information-sharing lapses that exist between professionals and agencies dealing with children, maintains former child-protection social worker and Barnardos’ CEO, Suzanne Connolly. However, she reminds it’s people who steer the system, emphasising the importance of highly experienced and well-supported personnel in countering such failures, especially in child protection systems.
Connolly asserts that a certain depth of expertise is necessary for child-protection workers to notice the subtleties, like recurrent absence of a particular child. Questioning one’s very own assumptions too becomes fundamental. She strongly contends for child-protection social work demographic to be honoured and acknowledged for their specialist skills and their experience-led knowledge.
For workers to stay consistently vigilant for any potential concealed threats, Connolly argues that well-regulated caseloads must be maintained, and they must be provided with suitable guidance from seasoned staff. This ensures no case gets overlooked and that there is room to discuss alarming issues.
The matter of Kyran Durnin has been passed on to the independent National Review Panel (NRP) for scrutiny by Roderic O’Gorman, the Minister for Children. The panel investigates cases involving the death of children known to Tusla or under its care. There have been instances when agencies outside Tusla’s jurisdiction hesitated to share information on deceased children with the NRP review teams, as highlighted in NRP’s 2023 annual report.
NRP’s chair, Helen Buckley, has been a long-time advocate for an all-encompassing governmental approach towards child protection. Under such a framework, all concerned agencies are obligated to divulge information when a child’s security is under threat. Although the Children First Act 2015 successfully enforced the necessity of mandatory reporting and cross-agency collaboration when there’s suspicion of abuse, it failed to instate such cooperation throughout the entirety of a case when a child’s welfare was threatened. According to Buckley, this remains a significant shortfall in child protection.