Kyran Durnin case: How can a child go missing for two years?

Grey curtains in the ground-floor window of Kyran Durnin’s last known home, in the Castletown area of Dundalk in Co Louth, were pulled shut on Thursday morning.

Behind the property, on the long row of redbrick houses at Emer Terrace, diggers could be heard at work searching waste ground for any sign of the Drogheda boy who was last known to be alive in 2022, when he was six. The diggers left on Thursday afternoon after gardaí found no sign of the boy.

Among the few locals who would speak to media the reaction was of bewilderment.

“How could it happen?” asked a young man from whose home on Fr Murray Park the search site was visible.

“It’s a shocking story. The poor wee chap. I wouldn’t have known him or the family at all. They were living in that house at the back there but I have only come to know them from this, this story. Jesus, it’s scary.”

Others voiced the same sense of bafflement and shock.

How could a boy go missing for two years and no one apparently notice? Was his absence not noted at birthdays or Christmas? How did the school system not notice? Was he involved in sports or the local scouts? If his family was known to Tusla, the State’s child and family agency, how did it not recognise he was not present?

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris on Thursday described the case as “extraordinary” – he has seen nothing like this in more than 40 years of policing.

Kyran Durnin was reported missing along with his mother Dayla Durnin (24) at the end of August by a family member. Gardaí, having made an appeal for information on their whereabouts on September 4th, stood down the missing people inquiry last week after tracing his mother in the UK and speaking to her.

Finding no evidence her son was alive they upgraded the investigation to one of murder.

The Irish Times understands that Ms Durnin, who has two younger children, has spent time in England recently and has been contacted by gardaí working on the case.

The case raises “profound questions”, says Tanya Ward, chief executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance – not only about Kyran’s interaction with State services, particularly in education and child protection, but also whether other children could fall through the same gaps in these systems that Kyran appeared to slip through.

“Maybe everything was done the way it should be. But what was done? Was there human error? Are there gaps in the systems? We just don’t know what happened here,” she said.

[ Gardaí receive huge volume of information from public on missing boy Kyran DurninOpens in new window ]

When last known to be alive, Kyran was in senior infants at St Nicholas’s Monastery national school, around the corner from Emer Terrace. It appears the school was told he would transfer to a school in Northern Ireland in September 2022. It appears there was no follow-up to ensure this happened.

A spokeswoman for Tusla, which operates the Education Welfare Service (EWS) that oversees school attendance, outlined what happens when the service receives a referral and determines a child was “missing in education”.

This means the child has “left school without notification of enrolment elsewhere and is within the compulsory school attendance age”. The EWS then “follows procedures to attempt to locate the young person and to ensure they are receiving an education”, she said.

Tusla was asked, in a follow-up question, who would make such a referral and whether a parent asserting they were moving the child to another jurisdiction would affect EWS inquiries but the agency did not comment.

St Nicholas’s Monastery school said it could not comment “on this tragedy as it is part of an ongoing Garda investigation”.

Niamh Murray, principal of Rutland national school in Dublin, has long voiced concerns about the laxity of systems intended to ensure children are enrolled in school and in circumstances where they leave one school whether they are getting an education in another school or at home.

“Essentially there are gaps and anomalies all over the system,” she said.

She says that when a child moves school, their new school should write to the old school telling them the child is enrolled with them, allowing the first school to remove the child from their register.

“We had a child a few years ago who left the school and we got no letter from a school. We were quite worried [and] weren’t even sure if they were still in the country,” she said.

“I raised it with Tusla and they said there was nothing they could do.”

She said she asked the agency if they could check if child benefit was being drawn down for the child.

“They said they couldn’t access the child benefit system [operated by the Department of Social Protection], because of GDPR” – a reference to the sweeping European Union regulations designed to protect people’s privacy.

“We never found out what happened to that child,” said Murray.

She worries about children, perhaps from outside Ireland, who may not be enrolled in any school. “What are they doing all day? It raises questions about human trafficking,” she said.

[ Kyran Durnin timeline: Eight-year-old reported missing a day after Tusla contacted GardaOpens in new window ]

She has known of children in emergency accommodation who have not attended school for more than a year. She worries that some four- and five-year-olds in junior infants are missing a lot of school, but because they are under the age of six they are not under the remit of the EWS, as the Education Act requires school attendance only between ages six and 16.

“So Tusla sends the referral back to us, saying there’s nothing they can do,” she said.

She continues: “If children are in school we can track them, we can do a lot to protect them, we have eyes on them. It is the most vulnerable children that need school the most.”

The school principal believes there must be a national database, using children’s PPS numbers, that “knows where every child is in school and flags those that aren’t”.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said it used “online databases to record student enrolment at primary and post-primary”.

“These databases are updated at school level. When a child moves from one school to another, schools are required to update the record on the relevant database,” the department said.

While Kyran was not in Tusla’s care, the agency was engaging with him and his family. It informed the Garda at the end of August of its concerns for his safety.

In past cases where children have fallen between the cracks of the system, it has been shown that “gaps in communication and information-sharing between professionals and agencies who have had contact with the child, pointing to systemic failures,” says Suzanne Connolly, former child-protection social worker and chief executive of Barnardos.

“But systems are operated by people,” she adds. These kinds of cases underline how crucial it is that people “at the front door” of child protection are “highly experienced and highly supported”.

[ â€˜Persons of interest’ identified by gardaí investigating Kyran Durnin disappearance, assumed murderOpens in new window ]

Only with a depth of experience can child-protection workers spot the “small signs”, such as the repeated absence of one of the children from the house, and can interrogate their own assumptions.

She believes child-protection social work should be “privileged” – recognised as the “most challenging … highly skilled and experience-intensive” area of social work.

“Staff need to have managed caseloads ensuring they can give appropriate attention to each case, receiving supervision from experienced staff, so they can discuss concerns, and pay attention to the unusual. Staff need to remain consistently alert to the potential of hidden risk.”

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has referred the case of Kyran Durnin to the independent National Review Panel (NRP), which examines the deaths of children in care or children known to Tusla.

The NRP’s 2023 annual report highlighted a reluctance of statutory agencies outside Tusla’s remit to share information on deceased children with NRP review teams.

Helen Buckley, NRP chair, has “long called for a whole-of-government approach to child protection” where all agencies are mandated to share information where a child’s safety is at risk.

While the Children First Act 2015 obliged mandatory reporting and “inter-agency co-operation” in an investigation into suspected abuse, it did not “extend to co-operation over the trajectory of a case” where a child’s welfare was a concern, she said.

This remained a “serious gap” in child protection.

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