Ripples in a pond: Do social work students need to learn about terrorism?

In the face of heightened awareness of terrorism, however it is defined, the challenges for social work are legion. Social work roles may include working with the military to ensure the well-being of service-men and women and their families when bereaved or injured, as well as being prepared to support the public within the emergency context of an overt act of terrorism. This paper reviews some of the literature concerning how social work responds to confl ict and terrorism before reporting a smallscale qualitative study examining the views of social work students, on a qualifying programme in the UK, of terrorism and the need for knowledge and understanding as part of their education

Child protection and welfare systems in Ireland: continuities and discontinuities of the present

This chapter provides an overview of the Irish child protection and welfare system, and examines continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present. 2012 is chosen as a pivotal change moment around which to critically examine current developments. This year is chosen due to seminal change events which occurred such as a referendum on the rights of the child and the publication of a report that led to the blueprint for the establishment of an independent Child and Family Agency in Ireland. We chart existing histories of child welfare and comment on significant trends and developments. Against the backdrop of this history, we discuss whether, almost 50 years on, the context, appetite for and investment in change, is to be realised in the biggest structural change to children’s services since the development of Community Care under the Health Act in 1970. In undertaking this analysis, we examine five themes: the establishment of a new Child and Family Agency (Tusla); Signs of Safety adopted as a new national child protection approach; changing trends in child welfare as demonstrated by recent statistics, retention rates for social workers in child protection; and dealing with retrospective child abuse disclosures, institutional abuse and Church-State relations

Protective support and supportive protection for families “in the middle”: Learning from the Irish context

This paper critically examines the relationship between statutory family support and child protection using the case study of Ireland. It builds on the work of Devaney and McGregor (2017) to offer an additional contribution to existing frameworks for practice through adapting the Hardiker Exton and Barker (1991) model of prevention. Using evidence from current Irish developments, the case for moving away from linear and simplistic differentiation of family support and child protection is made. Evidence from three main sources in Ireland is presented to develop the argument. This evidence includes the Child Care Law Reporting project (Coulter, 2015, 2018); a recent evaluation of a family support practice model called Meitheal (Rodriguez Cassidy and Devaney, 2018) and recent findings about public awareness of family support (McGregor and NicGabhainn, 2018). We argue that special attention should be paid to families "in the middle" who are in need of both support and protection and propose an adapted version of Hardiker et al. model to aid in this work. We identify what should happen at different levels for macrostructural to micropractice levels. We conclude that the learning from the Irish case study can be applied to an international context.peer-reviewed2021-08-0