Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State and hope he can stay for the whole debate, which marks a watershed in our social history.

In February 2009, following the Roscommon abuse case, I wrote an article entitled "Is it time for mandatory reporting of child abuse in Ireland". Following publication of that article in my local paper in Galway, a man, a victim of abuse in Letterfrack, one of the institutions covered in the report, visited my office. He told me he had been placed in that institution for three years for mitching school at the age of 12. He said he was raped, buggered and beaten. Luckily, in his case there was a conviction, but his life has been destroyed. Years later, in my office he cried about the difficulties he has experienced in his health in respect of alcoholism and particularly in forming relationships. Intimacy is very difficult for him owing to flashbacks. It took him nine years to get the courage to ask a woman out and, on a trip to Letterfrack, she admitted to him that she too had been abused. This is our history of shame.

I am aware of another case involving a young mother who reported the abuse of her 11 year daughter but found that the Director of Public Prosecutions refused to take a prosecution. I saw her distress as recently as last week, when I sought advice from Deputy Charles Flanagan. She is overwrought. In the absence of children's rights being enshrined in our Constitution, a statutory footing for the Children First guidelines or mandatory reporting by professionals, I hold little hope for change. I fear this litany of abuse will continue unless legal protections are put in place.

The Irish people have a history in which 170,000 children were plucked from their mothers' arms and put into institutions which destroyed their lives. The lesson we learn from this must be that children come first. The matter is now in the lap of the Minister and his Cabinet colleagues.

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is an appalling litany of sexual abuse, physical brutality and neglect perpetuated over a period of decades in institutions operated by various religious groups, men and women. The Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Deputy Barry Andrews, has described the report as a catalogue of failure and neglect by the State and religious congregations. This is the challenge he and his Government colleagues must address.

The State failed abjectly to enforce its own rules and regulations with regard to the treatment of children in institutional care. However, as Deputy Shatter has noted, the publication of this report should not mislead anyone into believing all is now well with our child protection services. Why, for example, were the recommendations of the Monageer report blacked out? In the aftermath of that report's publication, the Minister of State, Deputy Barry Andrews, refused to resource an after hours social work service because it would cost the State €15 million. I wonder whether he feels the same way now. The Ombudsman for Children had to call off an investigation because of difficulties with the HSE, the authority charged with the protection of our children's health. In recent days, the 2007 HSE report revealed that more than 8,000 child protection cases were not investigated during 2007. Where are these children now?

I draw the Minister's attention to what he is doing to children with mild learning difficulties. Children who have no speech or need toileting are being mainstreamed. As an educator who has worked in many classrooms, I can tell him that mainstream classes are no place for many of the children concerned. This will come back to bite us if we are not careful.