Dr. Finbar Markey:

When we say an iron fist, we usually do not mean physical violence, although the physical taking of a child is an act of physical intervention. The iron fist is usually administrative in nature. I will give an example, and I will do my best not to identify anybody. As a social care practitioner, a 17-year-old girl became pregnant in the service that I worked in. I attended a meeting one day, where it was announced to the social work team that this child, six months before the child was born, was going to go into care. What was read out next was a report that was completely falsified. This occurred in a meeting later on. The report stated that this particular girl, while in our residential care, did not take the child to the hospital to be seen for five weeks. This was the reason that an absolute decision was made to take the child into care. That was a falsified report. Ultimately, it would have been our duty to take that baby down to the hospital if the baby was sick, which the baby was not. I sat at a table with five other professionals, who all knew this was not true, but kept nodding their heads. The reason for this was because it was a private company that we worked for. It depended on the contracts and cheques from this social work team. No matter what injustice or breach of people's personal rights or law occurred, it would never be raised by professionals, who had gone through an academic process that taught and inculcated them to raise these issues and to follow the values they were taught in college. The iron fist has a gentle visual about it, in that it is quite often a piece of paper, but it is, nonetheless, damaging.

Another example of the iron fist is the use of funding as an excuse for everything. We do not have the funding and that is why X, Y or Z. Funding had nothing to do with falsifying that document. Funding had nothing to do with most of the things that mothers came to us about and that are not measured by HIQA. HIQA looks at statistics, that is, at quantitative data. It is a desktop operation. It does not hear the genuine, horrific stories from mothers and fathers. The fist is an administrative one, and yet it can be the most damaging. If one person gave another a punch in the face, that can be got over. It is another thing if someone drags a person through a court, tells lies about that person and destroys that person's persona within his or her community. We have known mothers and fathers who have taken their lives because of these processes. It is gut-wrenching to witness it but to go through it must be horrific. Personally, I was in an orphanage for four years, and I can tell you how impactful that is. I am an educated and a balanced man but it impacts your personality development from day one until the day you die in terms of how you feel about yourself in the world. As a baby and as a child, you cannot see that the system did this. You will think your mother did this, that she handed you up willy-nilly and that follows you through life. It causes drug addiction in the future, alcoholism and lack of personal faith in the self.

The iron fist is not a usual fist of violence. It is administrative processes that are designed to oppress, such that the family becomes the problem. While working in social care, I never once came across a case where we tried to unify a family. It was quite the opposite. Whenever a mother was coming down for access to her children, eyes would be thrown up. The attitude would be "oh we have to organise this again", as though it was a problem. The families then become the problem. In many cases, €1 million for a child over three years is not what is needed. Instead, more than anything else, what is needed is human understanding and to try different things. There is one case of a man, who is a friend of mine and who is blind. Tusla put on paper that he could not keep his child because he was blind. We eventually had private assessments carried out and the assessors could not believe this man. He could do everything with no sight. He could change and feed the baby and could do everything, and this shocked them. Tusla, however, still was not happy. He put in a complaint five years ago. That complaint has still not been sorted out. In fact, that complaint is held against him. That is the problem. It is culture-wide.

There are two types of values. There are espoused values, which are all the lovely things read on paper, and then there are the real beliefs and values that happen on the ground in a place. HIQA does not assess or collate the data from the real things that happen on the ground. It is a desktop operation. I thank the committee for its time.