Ms Mary Farrell:

The Office of the General Solicitor is part of the wards of court system. Many people do not have a committee to act on their behalf so the General Solicitor will act as committee of their estate. Once that happens, from that point onwards the family is excluded. They are provided with no details or information. They do not have phone calls returned or letters answered. Things like applications for medical cards are held up in the system, sometimes forever. We know of one such application that has been held up for over a year. I am sure there are others out there that we do not know about. Our group is small, without funds and operates informally. We were just set up for the purpose of supporting wards of court and trying to move this into a better position.

People coming under the General Solicitor are treated particularly badly and they have no come back at all. These may be families who have fought in the courts for years. One reads about such cases all of the time or hears about them on the news. The story is a familiar one. Afterwards they are interviewed and they say that they have been fighting their case with the HSE for ten years or more and so on. The individual is then taken into wardship and soon after, the General Solicitor, for some dubious reason, takes over committee of the estate. Thereafter, the family does not know how much is in the fund. They are, on the one hand, committee of the person and are trying to manage the person's well-being, their care and to organise all sorts of things in their lives but on the other hand, they do not even know how much money is in the fund. In the middle, there is a service provider who is sending accounts regularly to the Office of the General Solicitor. All of that is happening without any reference to the family or to the person who took the case, usually the parent of the child. This is what is happening. There are very questionable practices in this area. There is a lack of transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability are problematic across the board, but particularly with regard to the Office of the General Solicitor. There are serious questions to be asked in that regard.