Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I bring to Members' attention a typographical error in the text of the motion. The reference to "19th January" should read "21st January". I understand this error will be corrected in tomorrow's Order Paper.

I regret that the Government has deemed fit to table an amendment to this motion rather than simply accepting it. Unfortunately, this fits into the general conduct of the Government in dealing with issues relating to children. In the context of the entire area of child care, I have watched with amazement the contribution made to date by the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, with responsibility for children, Deputy Barry Andrews. Before Christmas, the Minister of State called on John Magee, the Bishop of Cloyne, to resign in view of his failure to implement child protection guidelines.

The failings of Bishop Magee were confined to the Cloyne area, whereas the failings of the Minister of State, Deputy Barry Andrews, his predecessors at the Office of the Minister for Children, this Government and all Fianna Fáil-led Governments in the last 12 years in the child care area have impacted on the entirety of the country. Child protection guidelines have been in place since 1999. Prior to that, other guidelines were in place which were replaced by the 1999 guidelines. The reality is that Fianna Fáil-led Governments and a series of Ministers of State with responsibility for children have presided over the Office of the Minister for Children, along with a succession of Ministers for Health and Children presiding over the senior Department, in circumstances in which the 1999 guidelines have been in place but have not been observed. There is no uniformity of application of the guidelines throughout the State. If what happened in Cloyne justifies the Minister of State's call for the resignation of Bishop Magee, what has happened throughout the State in the child protection area justifies a call not only on the Minister of State and his predecessors to resign but on the entirety of the Government to do the same. It is the height of hypocrisy for this Minister of State in particular, who has shown unprecedented incompetence in this brief, to call on others to resign from their positions because of their failings.

The tragic case in Roscommon, affecting six children in the family in question, has shone a spotlight on the adequacies of our child care system. The need for an independent investigation into what occurred, under the Commissions of Investigations Act 2004, cannot be denied. There is a need to know exactly why these children were condemned to live, for a period of eight years from 1996 to the end of 2004, in circumstances in which no child should be obliged to live. The Western Health Board should clearly have been aware that intervention was required. From 1989 onwards, the family was known to be a dysfunctional family with difficulties.

The inquiry the Minister of State has sought to put in place is neither independent nor are its terms of reference adequate, being far too narrow to address the issue that must be addressed. There is a need to inquire into the manner in which the Western Health Board and personnel attached to it addressed issues relating to this family throughout the period they had come to the notice of the board until the end of 2004 when the children were taken into care. There is a need to address how the Health Service Executive dealt with the children as and from its formation on 1 January 2005 and why it did not at that stage, the children having been taken into care, conduct a review of events that occurred in the preceding years to identify what went wrong and to ensure no repetition.

There is a need to inquire into why it is that the Minister of State with responsibility for children, who is supposed to have an overview of what is happening in our child protection services, had no knowledge of any nature of the tragic circumstances of the children in Roscommon until media reports emerged on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning of last week relating to the criminal trial. There is a serious dysfunction within our child care system. It is essentially broken. There is an entire lack of reasonable communication between the Minister of State with responsibility for children, the Department of Health and Children and the Health Service Executive which administers the child protection services. It is astounding that the Minister of State learned of what occurred from media reports. It is equally astonishing that it took the advent of the criminal trial for the Health Service Executive to conduct its 48-hour initial review.

Moreover, it is singly inappropriate that the executive has appointed two members of its staff to the team that is conducting the investigation or review of what occurred. To call such an entity an independent investigation is a corruption of the English language. I have no doubt the two staff members concerned are admirable individuals. Mr. Gerry O'Neill is the national manager with specialist child care responsibilities, while Mr. Paul Harrison is its national child care specialist. Essentially, however, the executive is being asked to investigate itself. In no sense of the term can this be regarded as an independent investigation. If the investigation is to be properly conducted, there are people who will disagree with the approach of the Health Service Executive who should be interviewed by those conducting the inquiry. It is entirely inappropriate that the executive be involved at that level. Justice in this matter must not only be done but must be seen to be done.

The other two appointees to the investigating team are eminently suitable. Ms Norah Gibbons is the director of advocacy at Barnardos and Ms Leonie Lunny has worked in this areas in different capacities for years. If an independent inquiry under the 2004 Act had been announced, comprising these two individuals with perhaps another third independent individual, I would have welcomed it. The Minister should reconsider what is proposed. I hope Ms Gibbons and Ms Lunny will also rethink their position in the context of this inquiry. It is singly inappropriate for it to be structured in this way.

The Minister of State will respond that previous inquiries have included health board personnel. Three such inquiries were conducted during the 1990s, including the inquiry into the death of Kelly Fitzgerald which also resulted from the failure of the Western Health Board to do its job properly. In all these inquiries, health board personnel were part of the investigating group. However, there was a key difference in that those involved were from health boards other than the one being investigated. They were truly independent. It seems the Minister of State and the Health Service Executive lost sight of the reality that the health board structure was abolished. The executive is the single body governing the area of child care. We no longer have eight or 11 different health boards. However, it seems that when the Minister of State and the executive were considering how to put a group together, they concluded that it would be fine to include executive personnel because past investigations always included nominees from the health boards. They were nominated from outside health boards. The HSE is the health authority, therefore, it cannot investigate itself. It is particularly inappropriate that two of the people involved in the HSE in the child care area conduct this investigation because the HSE has utterly failed to properly apply, in a uniform manner across the country, the Children First child protection guidelines of 1999.

A damning independent report commissioned by the Minister's Department, published at the end of July 2008, made it clear that there are huge problems in this area. This was confirmed in a statement issued by the HSE announcing the formation of this inquiry group. In announcing its formation, Laverne McGuinness, described as HSE national director of primary, continuing and community care, made reference to the fact that the HSE hopes during the course of this year to start uniformly applying the child care guidelines across the country. In other words, despite the fact that the Kelly Fitzgerald report, published in 1996, recommended that the then child protection guidelines should be applied uniformly throughout the country — as should the 1999 guidelines — and despite the fact that it also recommended that the application of those guidelines should be monitored by the Office of the Department of Health and Children, namely by the Minister for Health and Children in her Department, neither of those two recommendations was implemented. In that context, it is completely inappropriate that the HSE be included in this group.

The terms of reference for this investigation are too narrow. They are primarily concerned with the conduct of the HSE. What is to be examined is the entire management of the case "from a care perspective". In other words, the HSE will examine how the Western Health Board, and presumably itself, together with Norah Gibbons and Leonie Lunney, dealt with the children in this tragic family. Those terms of reference do not allow for an investigation into the involvement of schools and school authorities. Nor do they allow for an assessment to be done of the extent to which the recommendations made in the Kelly Fitzgerald report, published in 1996, were either implemented by the Western Health Board, by the HSE or by the Government. They should so provide.

The terms of reference do not provide for an investigation and for questions to be answered by the alleged shadowy group composed of a number of individuals referred to in the criminal case who facilitated, insisted or encouraged the mother in this instance to seek some form of High Court order. They do not require that the circumstances surrounding the obtaining of that order be investigated and the nature of the legal advice on which the Western Health Board relied be assessed. A whole range of issues that this inquiry should investigate and examine are excluded. The terms of reference also do not expressly include examining the contact doctors and nurses had with these children; the extent to which they made reports that these children were at risk; if reports were made, how they were responded to and followed up; and the extent to which reports were ignored.

The inquiry can deal with what the Western Health Board did but there is no basis within it for doctors and nurses to talk to those conducting the inquiry. There is no basis under which health board personnel, who formerly worked for the Western Health Board and are no longer employees of the HSE, can be required to co-operate with this inquiry. Those conducting it have no powers to serve subpoenas or to take evidence in a manner envisaged in the 2004 Act. As a consequence, this inquiry will not do the job that is required in the interests of protecting children, nor in the public interest. It is essential that this job is done properly and correctly.

In context of the inquiry being conducted, it is essential that it happens and that the issues are addressed, but I am heartily sick of the failures in our child care services which place children at risk, which result in children suffering and enduring harm for long periods during which it should never have occurred and for the fact that we produce reports that make substantive recommendations that are never implemented and nothing ever changes. I have before me the Kelly Fitzgerald report, a huge report that the Western Health Board, on its publication, pledged to implement. It was received by the Western Health Board in 1995 and it attempted to suppress its publication. I was a member of an Oireachtas joint committee that compelled its publication and ensured that in April 1996 it became public knowledge. This report contains a plethora of recommendations, some of which were the responsibility of the health board to implement and some of which were the responsibility of Government to do so. Most of those that fell within the responsibility of Government were never implemented. Clearly, from what occurred in this tragic family, many that were supposed to apply to the Western Health Board were not implemented.

There is no purpose in our having investigations and reports which contain recommendations if they are going to be ignored. There is no value in this investigation unless there is a look-back as to why the Western Health Board did not do what it should have done and why at the same time as this report became public knowledge the Western Health Board was dealing with children in this family and failing them. I do not want to hear anyone tell me that the reason the Western Health Board did not act sooner and take these children into care is because of constitutional difficulties. I have been advocating a constitutional referendum to protect the rights of children and explicitly recognise them for many years. I hope, ultimately, that we will have that referendum.

Last summer the Minister poured cold water on the need for a referendum and widely briefed that perhaps we should not have one. Irrespective of whether we do or do not need one, the absence of the type of changes we need in our Constitution is not the cause of the problems of these children in Roscommon. Section 18 of the Child Care Act 1991 gave the health board more than adequate powers to intervene and take these children into care. The child protection guidelines of 1999 set the parameters of what should have happened. Neither was properly applied. Those failures are not only a failure by the health board but of Government to ensure that matters are properly dealt with and monitored.

I want to cite one sentence from a key recommendation in the Kelly Fitzgerald report, published in 1996. It states that we recommend that the Department of Health adopt a proactive approach in monitoring health boards' child care developments in order to ensure consistency on a national scale, both in provision and in respect of procedures and practice. To this day, that has not been implemented. If it had been, these children caught in these tragic circumstances might have been spared some of the dreadful abuse that they suffered.

It is in the public interest that we get full answers to all these questions. The worst of all worlds would be that this inquiry commences, determines that its terms of reference are inadequate, a report is produced that deals with a portion of the issues and a further inquiry proves necessary. That should not happen.

A series of events with regard to children and to the brief exercised by the Minister of State, Deputy Barry Andrews, sadly illustrate that he is seriously out of his depth. The Government only responds to issues relating to children when matters that have gone seriously wrong are exposed in the media. It seems there is no mechanism in place between the Minister's Department and the HSE whereby alarm bells ring at a point in time where something has gone wrong to ensure corrective action is taken and reviews are conducted.

I believe there are many other instances of children at risk where there has been a failure to properly intervene. We know that there are hundreds of instances of children reported to be at risk of abuse whose files are sitting on shelves in the offices of the HSE without social workers allocated to conduct the necessary assessments and without the necessary intervention taking place.

I have some sympathy for social workers. Many social workers in the child care system are working in circumstances that are intolerable. They have too high a case load, do not get adequate training and do not always get the legal back up they require. The report published at the end of July was a damning indictment of the failure of the HSE to ensure that social workers in the child care area get the necessary in-service training.

I am sorry to say the Minister of State's history, and that of his predecessors in the Department of Health and Children — I campaigned to have the Department of Children set up — do not give rise to any great sense of optimism that the Department is contributing in this area in the way it should. It has become too interested in public relations. One of the central roles of the Minister of State with responsibility for children and young people should be to ensure that where children are at risk child protection services work properly, that where information is required in order to make policy the information is on hand, and that there is real time information about the workings of our child care system. None of these currently exists.

The failings of the HSE and the incapacity of the Minister of State to ensure we have an efficient service are clearly illustrated by the fact we are now in January 2009 and, despite its statutory obligations, the HSE has not yet published its report on the child care services for 2007. It sneaked its 2006 report onto its website in October 2008. If the Minister of State is to make policy in 2009, he will be relying on information from a report relating to 2006. That is totally inappropriate.

There is further significant hypocrisy concerning lack of communication and other issues the Minister of State has engaged in with the bishops. In the past few days there has been much publicity about the Minister of State meeting with the bishops and seeking to ensure the audit made on different dioceses will have information added that had been missing. This concerns part 5 of the questionnaire that was issued by the HSE. That section was one of the most vital parts of the audit as it sought to ascertain how many allegations of child sexual abuse had been made against members of the clergy, and the extent to which such allegations had been reported properly to the civil authorities by the church authorities in individual dioceses. It was essentially a statistical question. When the audit was finally published we discovered that the bishops had failed to answer that question. It became an issue about the credibility and value of the audit. All of a sudden the Minister became proactive to solve the problem. It was as if he had only discovered there was a difficulty when the audit landed on his desk.

When the documentation was published relating to that audit we discovered that in May 2007 the HSE had written to the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, who was then Minister of State with responsibility for children and young people, pointing out that bishops across the country were not responding to that section of the audit and were saying they had legal difficulties. Instead of an intervention by the then Minister of State or, subsequently, by Deputy Brendan Smith in the same position, nothing happened at Government level. Nobody actually cared. It did not matter. Only when publicity resulted exposing the lack of value of the audit and the difficulties that had arisen, did the Minister of State engage in some form of discussion, 18 months after being notified by the HSE of the difficulties it was experiencing in the conduct of the audit. That matter is not something for which the HSE can be criticised.

I will finish by referring to one final issue.

See this speech in context