Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to address the House this evening on this important subject. I apologise to the House that I do not have a written speech to share with Members. I hope they understand this is due to the short period of time I have had to prepare for this debate.

The death of any child in care is a tragedy, particularly when interventions that would be carried out in normal practical have not been carried out. I have said previously that in circumstances such as the one that has been the subject of public debate over the past 24 hours, the State has failed that young person. The State has rightly apologised with regard to clerical sex abuse and to institutional abuse and I certainly deeply regret the circumstances that led to the deaths of people whose deaths could have been avoided. It is a significant part of my work to try to order policy with regard to children in care. I am guided by the principle that the State should act in loco parentis, not just in the limited understanding of the Latin phrase in the legalistic context, but to truly take the place of the parent and provide support to the most vulnerable children in the State. This is our guiding principle and is the least we can afford to young people in this situation.

It is important we provide a context in the public domain for this debate. These young people, who display the most chaotic and challenging behaviour come into the care of the State for specific reasons, multiple reasons in some cases. These reasons have to do with traumas they have experienced in their childhood, for example bereavement, addiction problems, family breakdown, abuse etc. We cannot lock up children who present challenging behaviour in these circumstances whenever it suits us. We can only do this in limited circumstances, as outlined in High Court judgments and in practice. We can only do it for a time limited period. Therefore, these young teenagers who present this challenging behaviour and come into the care of the State are a real challenge for the State in providing care.

The assumption has been put forward in the House that reports on some of these individuals who have died in the care of the State have been gathering dust in my office. This is not the case. I remind the House that where reports have been written, they are often case review files and were not intended for publication. They were merely technical internal documents. I will go through the details on these in a moment. I know from comments made by the Opposition this morning that Opposition Members choose to ignore the basis on which these investigations are established. It is a fundamental part of our administrative system that we can carry out non-statutory inquiries from time to time. The basis on which people co-operate with non-statutory inquiries is on an understanding that their right to their good name and their constitutional right to privacy will be protected. We can be sure that if the precedent set yesterday is to continue, nobody will co-operate with a non-statutory inquiry because they can safely assume that some Member of the Houses will publish a report that is not meant for publication, the content of which is overly sensitive for dissemination in the public domain. It is impossible to expect those investigations to occur in the future if we carry on in that fashion.

I will now outline the circumstances, the state of knowledge of my office and the circumstances relating to ongoing reports with regard to cases on which Members of the Opposition have requested information. There have been nine cases, since 2000, of accidental death. Everybody in the House would agree that there are circumstances where pre-existing medical conditions occur. These are cases that are unavoidable and where there is no doubt in terms of intervention or the provision of the necessary supports. I will not go into the details of each case, but such medical conditions include leukemia and brain tumours, and there were other similar tragic medical circumstances. There were nine cases in that category.

There are eight cases in which reviews are continuing, for which I can provide only limited details. There was a suicide in 2006, on which a HSE report is almost complete. An inquest was carried out and the Office of the Ombudsman for Children is also carrying out an investigation arising from a complaint from a family member. The second is a suicide from April 2008; again, a date is awaited for the inquest. In this case, a review is expected in the next six to eight weeks. In the case of a suicide that took place in February 2009, an independent case review is under way. With regard to a death in 2006, a murder trial has recently been completed and an investigation into the input of social services is continuing. I note that the social service input in that case was of the first order. In the fifth case, a death in 2007 from overdose, the review is close to completion, while in a sixth case, a death from overdose in July 2009, a review is continuing.

The circumstances in the cases of DF and TF are well known, having, in the case of TF, been put in the public domain yesterday by Fine Gael. It was our intention, as I outlined yesterday and previously and as I requested of the HSE last Friday, that those two cases would be published in the near future.

There are six cases in which no further action is to be taken. The first is an overdose that occurred in 2000, for which no review was carried out because it was deemed at the time not to be necessary. By way of introduction to these cases, I must point out that it is now very much the practice not to ignore the duty to investigate such cases - they attract a serious case review automatically - but the practice in these earlier cases was quite different.

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