This International Kinship Care Week (October 6th–10th), Ireland joins a global campaign to champion families who step in when children need them most.
When parents cannot care for their children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, or close family friends often step up. This is kinship care – a lifeline that gives children love, stability, and belonging, while keeping them connected to family and out of State care.
In Ireland, up to 12,000 children are raised in kinship care every year. Yet most of these carers are left without the recognition or support they deserve and need. Instead, they face financial strain, legal barriers, housing insecurity, and gaps in vital health and education services.
Fewer than 1 in 4 children in kinship care receive a financial allowance, leaving many families pushed into poverty.
Unlike children in foster care, children in kinship care are denied the necessary package of supports- foster allowance, aftercare services, medical cards, therapeutic support, carer training- that can make the difference between struggle and stability.
The Department of Children, Disability and Equality (DCDE) have begun vital work to support kinship families. But DCDE cannot do this work alone, kinship care needs span health, housing, education, welfare, and justice. To truly protect children in kinship care, we need a whole-of-government response.
That’s why Treoir’s Kinship Care Ireland programme is calling on government to:
- Provide a Kinship Care Allowance equal to foster care payments, so that all children are equally supported.
- Guarantee child and health supports (Child Benefit, Back to School Allowance, medical cards) without unfair means testing.
- Ensure secure homes through housing grants and fair succession rules, preventing homelessness when relatives step up.
- Introduce Special Guardianship Orders where the child’s voice is heard, as well as access to fairer, faster, low-cost legal recognition for kinship carers.
- Give children in kinship care access to education and therapeutic support services, equal to those in foster or State care.
- Extend aftercare supports to children leaving kinship care at 18.
- Support kinship carers themselves with access to training, respite, and recognition of their vital role.
Why is this important?
Kinship carers are preventing thousands of children in Ireland from entering state care, saving the State billions, and keeping families together.
Now government must match their commitment in the Programme for Government with real, systemic change. The only way to succeed with this is to ensure kinship families voices are heard and that responses are collaborative across Government Departments.
Click here to sign and share this petition to stand with kinship families and call for a cross-departmental approach that ensures fair recognition, rights, and resources for every child in kinship care.