Speech by President Connolly at first National Barnahus Study Day
Radisson Red Hotel, Galway, 14 May 2026
A Chairde Uaisle, is mór an onóir dom a bheith i bhur gcomhluadar ar maidin chun an Chéad Lá Staidéir Náisiúnta Barnahus a fháiltiú. Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an Dochtúir Irina Ciocoiu, Comhairleoir Péidiatraiceach in Ospidéal na hOllscoile, Gaillimh as ucht an chuiridh.
I want to acknowledge the nature of the work that has gathered you in this room – the paediatricians, child protection specialists, Gardaí, social workers, therapists and nurses. You meet children at the moment when they are most in need of professional, careful, sustained attention, and a child remembers, for the rest of their life, how they were treated at that moment. That is difficult work. It is also work that the rest of the country does not always see clearly. I want to thank you for it.
Barnahus, which translates from the Icelandic language as ‘Child House’, brings together health, child protection, therapeutic, and policing services into a single coordinated response, in a single building, organised around the child rather than around the institutional convenience of any one agency.
The co-location of key professionals within a single, child-friendly environment, commonly described as comprising ‘four rooms’, represents the integration of core services of Tusla, An Garda Siochana, the HSE and therapeutic services.
Within this setting, multidisciplinary teams work collaboratively to deliver a seamless response.
Is fúibhse atá bainteach ar aon bhealach le saol an pháiste óig atá an dualgas fíor-thábhachtach agus riachtanach cinntiú go ndéantar chuile rud is féidir chun an páiste sin a chosaint. Is sibhse caomhnóirí na n-óg. Is sibhse atá ábalta cúram agus aire a thabhairt.
Since the Galway pilot in 2019, the model has expanded to Cork and Dublin and today brings together professionals working across all those agencies to strengthen shared knowledge, deepen understanding of the model, and reinforce the collaborative practice at its core.
Barnahus exists because we have learned, at terrible cost, what happens when children are not believed, when reporting is fragmented, when investigation is slow and uncoordinated, when therapeutic support comes too late or not at all, when the systems that should have surrounded a child are absent or obstructive. The model is, in a sense, a structural answer to both a structural and a moral failure.
As a country, we have been slowly coming to terms with those failures.
We have known for a very long time from a variety of reports and personal testimonies about the extent of sexual abuse in society. Yet our response was one of silence or denial.
Then when we were forced to look, when we could no longer avert our gaze, when the Ryan report detailed decades of ‘endemic’ physical, emotional and sexual abuse within state-funded institutions including industrial and reformatory schools, we still wanted to say that this is only happening in institutions, we still were not able to face up to the extent of the sexual abuse in our society.
We salvaged our consciences by enshrining children’s rights in our Constitution under Article 42A in 2015, following a referendum in 2012, itself a measure of how long it took us to place children’s rights beyond political equivocation. But in parallel, we utterly failed to take on board the multiplicity of reports and personal testimonies that highlight the prevalence of sexual abuse.
So many reports and accounts come to mind, but I mention only some: the Kilkenny incest case (1993), the Kelly Fitzgerald case (1993), Sophia McColgan (1995), the SAVI report (2002) (2014) the Louise O’Keeffe case, the O’Reilly sisters (2020).
That is the background within which you are operating and from which you have come. It would be reassuring to think that this was in our past, but the necessity for your service says otherwise, and so do the figures.
According to a 2022 Central Statistics Office report on sexual violence, 29 percent of Irish adults reported experiencing sexual violence as a child. Women reported experiencing it at a higher level than men (36 percent versus 22 percent). The figure rises to 41 percent of adults among 18–24-year-olds, indicating a particularly high prevalence among younger adults.
In 2023, we saw record-high levels of child protection referrals – almost 92,000 sent to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency. Approximately 5,500 of these were referrals for child sex abuse.
A recent nationally representative survey undertaken for the organisation One in Four found that 91 percent of people believe Irish society has failed to address child sexual abuse. A further 94 percent acknowledge its serious impact on wellbeing and development.
In the face of these figures, your work is all the more difficult and all the more important. These figures are not abstract. They are the measure of what brings every person in this room to work each morning, and why the quality of that work matters so profoundly.
Tá bhur gcosaint agus bhur gcúram de dhíth ag ár gcuid páistí ag am an-leochaileach dá saol.
I want to acknowledge, in particular, what makes a Barnahus function is not the building – it is the people inside it.
The multidisciplinary teams that are now in operation have done so against the grain of long-standing institutional habits, habits of working separately, of guarding professional territory, of treating coordination as something that happens after the fact rather than as part of the design. The Barnahus model asks something different of all of you, and it works because you have given it.
Today is an opportunity to reflect on how far the model has come since 2019, and what it will take to extend it across the country with the consistency and quality it requires.
Guím gach rath oraibh agus tréaslaím arís libh as ucht bhur ndúthracht agus sibh ag saothrú ar son leas na bpáistí.
Go raibh maith agaibh.