Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I will start at the point at which my colleague, Deputy Brian Hayes, started by saying I agree entirely with everything he said and I hope to add to it. This commission of inquiry, which has been sitting for a long time, has the important task of looking to the past and reporting on what occurred in our residential institutions. In the context of the investigation committee, it will seek to determine some of the perpetrators who behaved in an abusive fashion towards children in residential institutions. However, the report the commission publishes can only name those who have already been convicted; it cannot name those who have not been brought before the courts.

The commission is essentially concerned with the past, and its report, when published, will teach us lessons for the future, but I am concerned about the present. I am concerned that no one in this House, on the Government benches or in government, should rest easy in the belief that the type of abuse that was perpetrated in residential institutions and is currently being investigated as happening in the past is not occurring today. Children may be victims of both sexual and physical abuse, if not in residential institutions then in homes across the length and breadth of the country.

The remit of the HSE as a child protection authority is clearly described in legislation beginning with the 1991 Act, to which amendments have since been made. On the Order of Business today the Tánaiste referred me to the 1991 Act, which replaced the Children Act 1908. The difficulty with this area is that we have always had legislation on our Statute Book designed to provide protection for children. What have been lacking are services to ensure the legislation is enforced, support services to ensure families in difficulty are provided with the assistance they require and protection services to ensure that where children are truly at risk a proper assessment of the extent of that risk is made, measures are taken and interventions are made to provide child protection.

I believe the position today remains a national scandal. As one who has worked in this area, I despair of attracting the media's attention to the extent of what is occurring. Some of the social workers in this area also despair of attracting the media's attention. We all know that unless the media highlights an issue, the Government feels cosy enough to proceed as if nothing is wrong and ignore it. The "Prime Time Investigates" programme in recent weeks did some service in this area but its revelations have not been followed up by the print media. The print media will get excited at some point in the future when it is discovered that a child on an at-risk register, whose circumstances were not properly investigated, has been killed or admitted to hospital with appalling injuries resulting in criminal charges.

I want to make it clear in this House today that there is a major problem in this area. We should not discount what social workers say, though the credibility of some of what they say is often derided either by the Government or HSE managers to create the facade of a functioning child protection system. We do not have such a system; we have a seriously dysfunctional system with social and child care workers who are overworked and under extraordinary pressure. They know that if they make a decision that proves to be wrong they may be publicly pilloried at some stage in the future. More than 150 social workers in the child care service of the HSE are currently on some form of leave. Some are on maternity leave and some are simply on leave due to the impact of the pressures of the job. Social workers in child care teams who are on leave are not being replaced and other social workers are consequently under huge pressure.

Sadly, not only will children who have been reported to the HSE die and be seriously sexually and physically abused, it is inevitable that in ten or 15 years' time there will be yet another commission of inquiry into what occurred in the years 1990 to 2010 and what went wrong. The Children First guidelines require that children in residential or foster care have an allocated social worker to review how matters are proceeding and deal with problems that arise. There are currently children in residential care who have no functioning allocated social workers. We have children in residential care who, if they are experiencing the type of abuse being investigated by the Ryan commission, do not know how to get help because no special system has been put in place by the HSE to facilitate emergency access by children in residential or foster care to people independent of the system that first put them into care. What is happening on the ground is a scandal.

The Tánaiste, as happens in this House on a daily basis, ducked the issue during the Order of Business this morning. A game of chess is played in this House on a daily basis on the Order of Business and during Leaders' Questions whereby questions are put and issues raised that might get ten seconds of exposure on the 9 o'clock news or be reported in the following day's news media, and then everyone moves on to the next issue. Opposition parties that keep pushing issues are then derided by Government on the basis that they have nothing positive to say.

The positive thing I do have to say is that we have some amazingly able, hard-pressed professionals employed within the HSE who are constantly engaged in providing a fire-fighting service in child protection. However, the service that needs to be provided is beyond them. I believe it is beyond the managerial sector of the HSE, which is supposedly in charge. Under the Child Care Act 1991 the HSE has an obligation to publish annual reports on the child protection service. The report for 2005 went to the office of the Minister of State with responsibility for children around the end of June or beginning of July 2007 and did not surface anywhere in public until it was quietly put on the HSE website on 28 February 2008. It has never been formally published as a bound volume. The 2006 report still has not been published, and the 2007 report probably will not be published in 2008 despite promises to the contrary.

Among a whole series of scandals, the first major scandal is that the Minister of State with responsibility for children and, apparently, the HSE management structure have no up-to-date information on the number of children reported to be at risk. These children's cases have been adjudged to be serious and given priority listing, but the files are sitting in a drawer somewhere awaiting the allocation of a social worker so that a child and family assessment can be undertaken. There are hundreds of such cases throughout the country. I have attempted, through Dáil questions and through the HSE, to obtain the details of that information. The HSE either is deliberately concealing it or does not know it. I suspect that its systems are so poor that it does not know.

The Children First guidelines are not being applied uniformly. I will give the 2006 statistics in this respect. In the Dublin-mid-Leinster area there were 2,203 reports of possible child abuse — as opposed to neglect — which generated 1,546 genuine concerns, with the ultimate proportion of confirmed cases of abuse at 27%. In the southern HSE region, there were 2,556 reports of child abuse in 2006 — in other words, 350 more than in Dublin-mid-Leinster. Of these, 728 generated concern — less than half the number that generated concern within the Dublin-mid-Leinster region — and the proportion of confirmed cases of abuse was 7%. Is anyone telling me that the Children First guidelines are being uniformly applied to provide child protection? In Dublin-mid-Leinster, out of 2,203 reports of children at risk, 27% were confirmed to be genuine, while in the Southern region, out of 2,556 reports, only 7% were confirmed to be genuine. Based on these statistics, child abusers who go and live in Cork are more likely to be allowed to abuse their children continuously for years because no one will ever properly investigate it. This is a major scandal and a disgrace.

On the Order of Business today the Tánaiste waffled about the 1991 Act. I know it exists. What I want is a Government that can come to this House and tell us that we have the structures and resources in place to protect children, that we are uniformly applying the Children First guidelines, and that if a child is determined to be at serious risk, that child's circumstances will be investigated — if not within a matter of hours then within days — and the necessary social work intervention will take place. At the moment that assurance cannot be given. That is a disgrace and a scandal.

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