Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I wish to share my time with Deputy Mattie McGrath.

The history of our country in the 20th century will be rewritten as a result of the Ryan commission of inquiry and its report. Things we held to be self-evident have been challenged to their core. Yesterday, survivors brought a banner to Leinster House referring to the phrase in the 1916 Proclamation that the State would resolve to cherish all the children of the nation equally. This sentiment was not considered controversial at the time and yet today it is clear that such idealism was misplaced. It is now clear that our society was ordered in a way that permitted systematic and institutional neglect and abuse of our children. Many different factors permitted this abuse to occur and to continue for many years. The idealism of the 1916 Proclamation was suffocated by undue deference to religious orders by some and indifference by others. The damage done to the lives of those who endured such abuse is apparent to us all. There will, of course, be no peace for the survivors of such abuse unless we live up to the ambitions set out in the recommendations of the Ryan report.

I was honoured to be asked by the Taoiseach to formulate a response to the recommendations of the Ryan commission report by way of an implementation plan. Before I go into the details of how I propose to do so, I will refer to an individual story that came to my attention. It concerns a lady who lives near my constituency office who herself is a survivor of abuse. Her story is very similar to many and the publication of the report was very difficult for her. She took a copy of the report to the grave of her brother and sister who also had been survivors of abuse and she buried the report in the earth in the grave to try to convince herself that they would appreciate that the report had been written. There is a great appreciation that this whole process that began ten years' ago has arrived at this conclusion. People say this is all in the past but child abuse very rarely comes to the surface or is known about until adults are in a position to complain about it. In our society in the 1990s, many people brought this to attention. The political establishment slowly but eventually accepted there was a very serious issue that had to be addressed. The ten-year process of redress and the commission followed, and we are here today, at the soonest time this could have come to our attention. We could not have had this debate in the full knowledge of what was revealed in the Ryan commission report before this day. It is not in the past. It is inevitable with child abuse that it does not come out until much later and we must bear that in mind.

The recommendations of the Ryan report have been accepted by the Government. There are specific recommendations that refer to the current child protection services in this State. When I was appointed Minister of State with responsibility for children I said that child protection would be my priority and it has so continued to be.

I wish to refer in particular to five recommendations. Recommendation No. 6 states that services should be tailored to the needs of children. Recommendation No. 9 refers to the need for better information about children and states that a database should be kept. Recommendation No. 12 deals with inspections. Recommendation No. 16 deals with continuity of care and social workers. Recommendation No. 17 refers to aftercare. These issues are central to the way I propose to present an implementation plan to Government.

Since I was appointed Minister of State with responsibility for children I have had monthly meetings with the HSE to drive a reform agenda. A number of objectives have been achieved in those 12 months, to the credit of the HSE. I refer particularly to a taskforce which will report this month. This will ensure there will be a standardisation of the method by which children at risk are assessed and referred by social work staff. At present there is a legacy from the old health boards which means we do not know exactly what is happening in child protection services in this country. That is a terrible failing. Only by standardising the service can we ensure that in the future when we deploy resources we will avoid duplication, address inefficiencies and fill the gaps that are so patently present. I look forward to the publication of the taskforce's report later this month.

Second, there will be a single appointment of an individual in the HSE with responsibility for children and families. This is the first time this has occurred in child protection in this country. It is very important this should occur and I made this case to the HSE which accepted that such a person must be appointed.

Third, a knowledge management strategy is being developed and a business plan is currently being peer reviewed. At present two computer systems are used by social workers in this country. In eight or nine local health offices, LHOs, there are no computer facilities of any kind with the result that at no time can we obtain a picture of the shortcomings which are evidently present. We hope the knowledge management strategy and the ICT proposal will address that shortcoming.

Finally, an achievement of the recent past is that there will be no recruitment embargo in respect of social workers. During recent weeks I had meetings with social workers in Dublin and in Cork and will attend other meetings in Galway and Tullamore. The purpose of those meetings was to try to speak to social workers themselves. I believe there is a problem in this country with regard to the perception of social workers, and not only among service users. We saw this last summer in the review of Children First. Service users have a very negative view of social workers but so do journalists and politicians and that is something we must address. For that reason, I propose to meet social workers face to face in town hall-type meetings. The first of those occurred last month in Dr. Steevens' Hospital where 150 social workers gathered, in their own time outside working hours and at their own expense. They expressed to me their concerns about the shortcomings that currently exist.

The problems they identified are in common with those in the UK. Following the Baby "P" case Lord Laming prepared a progress report on the protection of children in England in which he outlined some of the problems that exist in the UK. He made the point that there is a high degree of public vilification of social workers and specifically stated that "low staff morale, high caseloads, under-resourcing and inadequate training each contribute to high levels of stress and recruitment and retention difficulties". Lord Laming went on to say that public vilification of social workers has a negative effect on staff and has serious implications for the effectiveness, status and morale of the children's workforce as a whole. As a result, specific proposals have been made in the UK from which we can learn much.

I also propose to meet the National Social Work Qualifications Board to discuss the types of changes we can introduce to try to improve the type of social work service we provide. We must do a review of the type of work experience that is provided to social workers while they are in college. We must examine course content. The UK report suggested that two-thirds of graduates feel the degree prepared them "just enough" or not at all for their current role. There should be much stronger support for social workers in the first year post-qualification. I do not understand a system in which a social worker leaves college and goes straight into front line, complex difficult social work cases. They deal with the toughest families and cases and must make extremely challenging decisions. As we learned at the recent Impact conference, sometimes they make those decisions under the threat of physical violence.

These are people who have just come out of college. That is wrong. The promotion and career structure in social work in this country means that when one is promoted one goes back into the office and becomes a manager. My view is that in most professions where difficult decisions must be taken to protect children only the most qualified people are given the task of dealing with the toughest types of cases. The way we deal with social workers in this country must be addressed. Consideration should be given to addressing burn-out by looking at ways of allowing staff to take time off from hard-core work at the coal face of social work. Each social worker should have a mixture of both child protection and child welfare cases.

The second issue I wish to address is Children First. Last year there was a review of this report from which it was clear that there is an inconsistency in the implementation of Children First across the country. The question of mandatory reporting has been suggested on a number of occasions in this House. I am not attracted to mandatory reporting. In jurisdictions where it has already been introduced the result has been a very high increase in reporting but no corresponding increase in substantiated cases of child abuse. As a result of these patterns, serious consideration is being given in those jurisdictions to reversing or adapting the policy. In those countries many social workers spend much of their time processing referrals that have no grounding in fact. Sometimes referrals are considered defensive by authorities in order to avoid the penalty for failure to report. However, I accept that changes must be made in respect of Children First. Whether this means putting it on a statutory footing, trying to improve training or improving the implementation across different agencies must be considered.

One point that comes up all the time in the way we try to deal with children is the concept of joint or inter-agency working and intergovernmental responses. In December 2007 the Office of the Minister with Responsibility for Children published the agenda for children's services. This set down some key questions for Departments to try to make sure they were focusing on the protection of children and providing better services for them. It challenged people to put children at the centre of services rather than have services in which we hoped children might fit. Services should be able to reach out to each other so that children do not fall through the gaps. In my constituency work I come across this all the time. I have seen it at a more serious level in the failure of different agencies to talk to and work with each other.

Teachers, gardaí, the local authorities, the HSE, the legal profession and non-governmental organisations all have a role in this regard. This point is mentioned in every review of child protection in this country. We need to have better inter-agency work and better joint working. We need agencies to talk to each other, but this is one of the most difficult things to achieve. Therefore, we must wonder if there is a better way to ensure this is achieved. Perhaps we should consider requiring that agencies work together rather than express it as an aspiration.

We have children's services committees in four local authority areas in Ireland and these are working extremely well. They bring together the agencies to which I have referred. The one in Limerick, for example, parallels the regeneration body and provides knowledge of children. When a primary school presents in junior infants, a primary school teacher can already tell if that child faces a life of addiction, of complex home problems or of contact with the criminal justice system. Teachers can tell that from a very early age, yet we do not have the reaching out of services among the different agencies. This is a big challenge and one of the proposals I hope to be able to bring to Government is a response to how we will improve this in the immediate future.

Aftercare is another issue I would like to mention. The United Kingdom has provided evidence which shows that many people who become involved in the criminal justice system have a care history - up to two thirds of them. This allows only one conclusion - that the care system does not work. This is a serious shortcoming and must be addressed. Aftercare in Ireland is addressed on a statutory basis by section 45 of the Child Care Act 1991. I have received many submissions, including from Focus Ireland, that suggest aftercare should be put on a mandatory basis so that wherever a need is identified, it will be met. This has major resource implications. All of these considerations will help form part of the response I propose to put to Government.

I thank the Survivors of Child Abuse for the presentations and oral submissions to me over the past few weeks. It has been a very difficult time for them, but they have conducted themselves with great dignity. They have articulated, on behalf of their many members, the true suffering and pain they have had to endure. My obligation is to ensure the Ryan report was not done in vain. Their legacy will be what significant improvements we can make for the children of today and the future.

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