Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Two years ago the country was shocked by the tragic death of a young family in Monageer, County Wexford. Adrian Dunne, his wife, Ciara, and their two children, Lean and Shania, aged five and three years, were found dead at their home in Monageer a couple of days after Adrian Dunne had inquired about arrangements for their funerals with a local undertaker. Following the tragedy, the then Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Brian Lenihan, established an inquiry to find out what had happened, to look at the appropriateness of the response of the State agencies and to learn from the experience with a view to seeing what could be done to avoid such a tragedy happening again.

The inquiry reported to the Government in October 2008 and the report was eventually published yesterday. When I say it was published, only part of it was published because pages of the report have been completely blacked out. I have heard of a report being a whitewash but this is a blackwash, where entire chunks are blacked out. Extraordinarily, even some of the recommendations are blacked out, something I have never seen in an official report. I have a number of questions about this. The report states that ultimately there is no way to prevent such a tragedy, even with the best intervention in the world. Sometimes these things happen, which I accept. However, the value of an inquiry such as this is to learn some lessons from the event, to establish if everyone in the chain was doing his or her job, if agencies were acting appropriately and if matters can be improved to prevent a recurrence.

We do not have the full report. Is there some way it can be made available to the House? The House has privilege and there were occasions when reports of a sensitive nature were made available to the relevant committee of the House. Will the full report be made available to the Joint Committee on Health and Children? Has the Taoiseach seen it? Is it true the HSE has not seen it? A representative of the HSE was on radio this morning to claim it had not seen the full report and recommendations. How are recommendations to be implemented and enforced if we do not know what they are? The Government has had the report since October 2008. Can the Taoiseach tell us what recommendations made in the report have been implemented or acted upon since?

A central recommendation that we can see concerns the necessity for an out-of-hours child social work service to be established. The difficulty is that if a problem arises with a family at risk or having trouble after 5 p.m. or at the weekend, there is no service available. These are the very times the service is most needed - at night and weekends. The problems that arise in families that lead to tragedies such as this are not normally ones that arise between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. The Minister of State with responsibility for children and youth affairs has said that in current financial circumstances, it is impossible to put in place an out-of-hours service. It may not be possible in the sense of putting in place a fully staffed and resourced replication of the service available during the week but surely it is possible to have some emergency arrangement in place whereby if a garda, a priest or someone in touch with a family comes across something like this, there will be some support and service available to intervene, find out what is happening and try to avoid such a tragedy occurring again?

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