Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2013. I heard Deputies Troy and Mattie McGrath refer to a delay in the legislation. We all want everything to do with child protection passed through this House and in operation as quickly as possible. While everything is urgent, not everything can be delivered at the moment, as we would like it to be. This is another piece in a jigsaw we have been assembling over the past two years to reform and restructure child protection services. We have had the children's rights referendum, to which others have alluded, and the announcement of the new child and family support agency, which is an exciting new departure. We have seen the appointment of more than 200 additional social workers. What is colloquially known as the child death report has been published and adoption legislation has been drafted. An entire veil of secrecy, inefficiency and failure has been pulled back on how this State treats children, particularly vulnerable children.

This is a technical Bill, but attempts to downplay its importance is doing the Bill and those who will depend on its provisions a disservice. When a child is taken into care without his or her parents' consent, it occurs for reasons of child protection. It is done to ensure that a vulnerable child is removed from a potentially dangerous situation. It is done for a child's welfare. The amendment to extend the period of interim care order from eight days to 29 days will allow risk assessment to be carried out. It will enable, empower and most importantly implicitly insist that the State's agencies carry out comprehensive assessments to avoid time running out resulting in people having to waste time running back to the court to seek additional orders.

The need for risk assessment was clearly outlined in the child death report, and this amendment will acknowledge and go some way to address the findings in that report. The President of the District Court has highlighted the deficiency in the current interim care orders and the inability to seek an extension to an order in excess of eight days. This need for State services to return constantly and regularly to court owing to this anomaly is taking up significant time and resources in our courts for social workers. We all know the importance of social work hours and social workers need to be freed up to be directed to where they are needed, working directly with vulnerable children and vulnerable families. More importantly it is completely unfair to a child and against his or her best interests to have such constant adversarial situations in court. Vulnerable children need to be supported and do not need to be put in unnecessary adversarial situations.

In welcoming the legislation I take the opportunity to refer to three issues relating to child care and child protection. I welcome the work the Ministers, Deputies Fitzgerald and Shatter, are doing to reform family courts. An issue that often comes up - it was raised during the children's rights referendum campaign - is that we simply do not know what goes on in these family courts. I understand there are important and sensitive issues of confidentiality relating to the protection of a child's rights and those of a family. However, we need more data and the scheme introduced allowing someone to collate information, report on what is going on and give us a picture of what is happening without breaching that confidentiality will be really exciting and informative. It will help educate us and feed into better policy for our family and child courts. I look forward to further developments in that regard.

I share the views of other speakers that another exciting aspect of the children's referendum is that we have now seen the draft adoption legislation. We look forward to it being implemented to give Irish families the opportunity to adopt children who might have been in their foster care. Many people have gone abroad to adopt and there is no criticism of that and no doubt it will continue. However, it is very welcome that families will have the chance of adopting within this country.

I have discussed the issue of childminders with the Minister previously. I know child minding and childminders are covered by the Child Care Act 1991, which we are obviously amending today. Child minding cannot be excluded from issues relating to child protection and standards. I accept that the area is extremely complex and I have heard the Minister discuss the matter previously in the House. Do we really want to regulate and vet every babysitter, granny and aunt? I understand it gets very complicated. However, approximately 50,000 young children are being cared for by childminders every day. That estimated figure came from a Goodbody report Start Strong commissioned in 2011. There are approximately 19,000 childminders, of whom only 257 notified the HSE of their existence. The Child Care Act 1991 makes exemptions for the relative of a child or the spouse of a relative; anybody who is caring for children from one family in addition to their own children; and anybody caring for three or fewer preschool children of different families. However, Childminding Ireland has advised that 53% of its childminders are caring for three children or fewer.

I do not profess to have the answer to this situation and while I know these issues are always more complex than they first appear, I ask the Minister to look at best international practice. In particular she should look at the model in Scotland where considerably more childminders are registered than is the case here. There are 6,000 registered childminders in Scotland with a very similar population of 5.2 million compared with our 4.6 million. The quality standards for childminders in Scotland are high. Scotland has a system of registration rather than notification. No childminder is exempt - everybody must register and then policy can decide what happens next.

This is a complex issue and we have had a proud tradition of people being minded in the home and by relatives. That tradition is one that people in communities value. However, quality matters everywhere, including where children are being cared for by childminders in what are generally rather informal situations and small numbers. As the Minister continues with her ambitious agenda of reform of child protection, I ask her to explore what is happening in other EU countries and elsewhere. Her officials should look at what is happening in Scotland, a country of comparable size just across the water, and also what is happening just up the road in Northern Ireland where structures are in place. At some point perhaps we can have a broader debate in this House. It is not as clearcut or as easy as people like to make it sound at times, but it certainly merits proper discussion in the House at some point.

I welcome the amendment and thank the Minister for bringing it before the House.

See this speech in context