Mr. Fergus Finlay:

I thank the Chairman and members. When one sees the sign "Under New Management" over the door of an establishment, it is a promise of change and improvement. It is the reason people put up the sign. It is almost sending out a marketing message that, "We are here to make a difference". In that sense and in that context, the development of the new agency is extremely welcome. It is long overdue.

It is timely and important from two perspectives. The first is that the existing system has failed. It was badly designed in the first place. It is a regrettable fact that in the first five years of the life of the HSE the subject of children never once appeared on the agenda of the board of the HSE. That was because the HSE was set up to deal with a myriad of things, and found itself from the first moment engulfed in a series of crises and lived its life in many ways by trying to manage those crises. In the middle of all that it forgot, essentially, particularly at board and senior management level, that it had statutory responsibility to protect vulnerable children. Taking the responsibility away from the HSE and giving it to a dedicated agency is important and positive, but we should not forget that it was necessary because of failure, and in some senses accelerated because of scandal.

The change is timely and important for a different and perhaps more pressing reason. In my working life I have never been more scared of the number of children at risk in Ireland. They are not at risk in the ways that are most obvious but the latest official figures show that 107,000 children are living in consistent poverty in Ireland. Consistent poverty is well and clearly defined. Those children are living with a much greater risk of hunger, cold, not having the kind of clothes they need and a range of other deprivation indicators that affect them. They are living in families that are under increasing stress.

More than at any time in my working life there are stresses and strains associated with poverty, family breakdown and community breakdown that are at play and that are leading to a rapidly escalating increase in the lower levels of child concern. I say lower levels because the thresholds are far too high. Far too many children are at risk of neglect in Ireland. A smaller number are at risk of abuse but an extraordinarily large number are at risk of neglect. Those children are much more likely to drop out of the education system early. They are much more likely to be involved in anti-social behaviour when young. They are much more likely to drift into crime as they grow, and they are much more likely to be part of the prison population in ten or 15 years’ time. They are the children we are failing now. They are the children the new agency has been established to find and work with. The agency can only do it if it is supported by a community and voluntary sector and bodies such as the family resource centres that are heavily engaged in family support.

We have a culture and tradition in Ireland of being willing to spend whatever it takes to pick up the pieces after damage has been done. Professor Dolan has made the point that if one invests a euro in preventing damage, one gets a €29 pay-off over time. We have got to vest the new agency with the authority and resources to begin to prevent damage. The way to do that is to intervene early, to support families, to be assertive when it is necessary, to be directive when it is necessary, but to have a set of practices and a culture which are absolutely dedicated to ensuring that we nip problems in the bud. In some ways it is as simple as that. The agency is not going to be as well equipped to do that as it should be. It starts off with a budget that was protected on day one in the sense that all of the resources that used to be in the HSE have been transferred across in financial terms.

The agency does not have the right resources or enough resources in personnel terms. Professor Dolan made the point about public health nursing. Anyone who knows the work of the public health nursing profession would regard it as the best early warning system in the State. A public health nurse is supposed, by law, to visit every newborn child in Ireland five times in the first two years of life. The profession is better equipped than almost any other to know what is going on in families but they are not going into the agency. That is daft. It is crazy and it needs to be addressed by the system as quickly as possible. The agency needs authority. That authority must be in the law we have not seen yet. It needs to be set up on a firm financial footing.

It is worth the committee’s while noting that the first decision the agency has had to communicate to everyone it funds is a 5% cut in funding with effect from 1 July. It has done its best, as far as I can tell, to protect resources but one is still talking about a 5% cut. Barnardos is part of the community and voluntary sector which has experienced cuts ranging from 15% to 30% over the past two and a half years. The agency is depending on a community and voluntary sector which, if it has not been decimated, is under intense pressure. It is depending on parliamentarians to pass effective legislation which gives it real authority, and it is depending on real reform in culture, practice and in awareness of the fact that we are not reaching all of the children that need to be reached.