Minister for Education Norma Foley has said she will be pursuing a potential “tightening up of things” with her counterpart in Northern Ireland in the wake of the case of Kyran Durnin.
Asked about how a child could go missing from the school system without drawing the attention of the authorities, Norma Foley said that Kyran Durnin had certainly been “lost in the system”.
“That should never have happened,” she said.
“Clearly there are questions to be answered but I await the garda inquiry and the Tusla report.”
The minister said she expected that report in coming days.
The last confirmed sighting of Kyran was at the end of the school year 2022.
When the then 6-year-old failed to return to school it was understood by state authorities that he had moved to Northern Ireland.
“[On] the issue of a child moving to another jurisdiction, schools do accept the bona fides of parents and guardians when they say they are taking their child to another jurisdiction or another country,” Ms Foley said.
But she said she was “very keen” and she had “absolutely no doubt that [Northern Ireland Minister for Education Paul Given] would be very happy to engage with me in terms of maybe tightening up things” when it comes to a child moving from one jurisdiction to another.
“I will certainly be pursuing that,” she said.
A search at the former family home of Kyran and an adjoining area of open land in Dundalk, Co Louth, ended earlier.
Gardaí said the results of the search were not being released for operational purposes.
They believe the boy may have been killed up to two years ago when he was aged six.
