Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

I commend the Chair of the committee, Deputy Mary O'Rourke, Deputies Shatter and Howlin and their respective party colleagues and the Minister of State, Deputy Barry Andrews, for the commitment to the project entrusted to us by the Houses of the Oireachtas. I wish to record my thanks to Anne-Marie Fahy, the secretary to the committee, and our legal advisers over the past number of years. I thank all who engaged with us over that period through oral presentations and written submissions. They have contributed to what is a worthwhile result and outcome.

Sinn Féin welcomes the publication of the final report of the Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children. The timely publication of this report presents an important opportunity to strengthen children's rights in this State. It took 62 meetings of the committee to reach a cross-party consensus on the wording of an amendment that, if passed, will enshrine children's rights in the Constitution. The representatives from each of the political parties on the committee agreed that it is time for a referendum that will give children rights as individuals, above and beyond those derived from their status as mere members of a family unit and only a family unit based on marriage as defined in the Constitution. The proposed wording in this report is an important step on the road to cherishing all children of the nation equally. It is now up to the Government to take the wording offered and hold a referendum that will afford children specific rights to care and well-being, as well as the right to be heard in matters concerning them.

The amendment should also go some way to addressing some of the legal obstacles affecting the child protection system. If an amendment such as the one contained in the report was enshrined in the Constitution, the State would have the sufficient legal power to intervene on behalf of all children at risk regardless of their parents marital status. Some of the wording in this amendment was inspired by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Sinn Féin believes should be the absolute minimum in standards for children's rights. The principles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child have been reiterated in numerous international and national treaties and it is now time the State took a rights-based approach to how children are treated in our laws and policies. Sinn Féin is calling on the Government to table legislation to hold a referendum on the issue of children's rights as a matter of urgency.

While Sinn Féin has been a long-time advocate of enshrining children's rights, we must remember that there are not only legal issues to be resolved in order to enhance the rights of children. We have recently seen the admission by a senior HSE representative that there are more than 20 reports on the deaths of children in State care awaiting publication. Despite repeated questions on these reports that I put to the HSE via the Minister for Health and Children, which went repeatedly unanswered, it took the publication of a report by another member of the joint committee, Deputy Shatter, for a representative from the HSE to acknowledge these reports existed. Information was wilfully withheld by someone in the HSE who stated that the information I was seeking was difficult to collate. I sought this information over an eight month period. There is no room for any more cover-ups on children in State care and there is no valid excuse for the delay in publishing such reports. The HSE and the Department must be answerable to elected representatives in this House and the Upper House.

If we as Members of the Oireachtas, as parents, and as people residing in this State are to entrust the care of children whose families can no longer care for them to the State, the State care regime must be accountable and fit for purpose. At the moment, the law and policy governing children's rights and child protection is not only unsatisfactory, it is archaic and verging on the disgraceful. The Minister for Health and Children and the HSE hide behind the excuse of protecting the identity of the children who died in their care. This is a sad reflection of the reality that the HSE's care for these children only began when they died. Conducting an inquiry and writing a report containing recommendations on the plethora of inadequacies throughout the State's care system is too little too late if the recommendations are never published let alone implemented. That has been the sorry state of affairs to this point.

This is not just an issue of referendums and changes in law. An amendment that does not provide for adequate increases in resources for child services will be utterly meaningless. The State is dysfunctional when it comes to children's rights. We only have to look at the Tracey Fay report for a horrifyingly graphic illustration of that. It is only now the HSE is admitting that not all children in State care have an allocated social worker. Some children that have social workers might not see them for years at a time. The Roscommon child abuse case showed us that even where social workers for children are allocated, terrible abuse and neglect will continue. Relatives who become foster carers for children are not always vetted. The HSE could not even give me a straight answer when I asked if all of its employees who worked with children are vetted.

A clause in the Constitution for children will be toothless if there is not large-scale reform of child policy. In my view, enshrining children's rights in this manner will, nevertheless, ensure that the best interests of the child will be paramount in matters concerning custody and guardianship. This will provide a valuable platform as, collectively, we of all political views and one, work towards ensuring the best interests of the child becomes paramount in all matters concerning the child, a cornerstone of the United National Convention on the Rights of the Child. This legal change will mean that social services will have the capacity to intervene where parents are married and that children's rights will be viewed, not secondary to the rights of the marital family, but rights in their own right.

Sinn Féin pressed for the insertion in the proposed wording of a commitment to have children's voices heard. This is integral to the rights of the child. Acknowledging that particular right is imperative to the wider rights of children. The Child Care Acts 1991 and 1997 permit the appointment of, at the discretion of a judge, a guardian ad litem for a child involved in court proceedings. We must look to international best practice in this area to reform the current processes. In Scotland, a guardian ad litem is automatically appointed unless there is a major reason this should not happen. Sinn Féin believes we should be aiming for the highest standards for our children. Much can be learned from the approach of other jurisdictions in this area.

It is a shame that it has taken almost two decades for us to arrive at a cross-party agreement on children's rights. Consistently, this and previous Governments have failed to acknowledge the deficiencies in child policy and law. At last, we are getting there. The rights children will be now given must be, as I have repeatedly stated in my contribution today, complemented with sufficient resources. Teenage mams and dads, themselves children, must be supported to continue, if at all possible, in education while parenting. Children with cystic fibrosis must have the right to adequate and appropriate health care. Social worker posts must be filled and resourced. Children with mental health issues must be seen and supported immediately and not forced into adult wards. Parental support mechanisms must be in place. Children at risk must be listened to before it is too late and they too become the subject of yet another internal HSE report. Crisis management cannot be the cornerstone of how children are dealt with in this State.

There needs to be joined up thinking when it comes to policies affecting children. On housing policy, for example, is geared towards purchasing homes, and those who cannot afford housing are left to the mercy of a local authority waiting list, often for as long as five or six years, depending on the local authority in which one lives. In reply to a question I put to the Minister for Health and Children, I learned that in 2007, 1,342 children were placed in care under the heading "Family Unable to cope/Family Difficulty Re Housing/Finance." Let us consider this. Some 193 families, 6%, of those reported to be having difficulties had children placed in care as a result of their having housing or finance difficulties. That is a shocking fact. It is dreadful that 1,342 children of 193 families were placed in State care because their families were experiencing housing or finance difficulties. It is unacceptable that a child may be removed from the home because of housing or finance difficulties when to do so is not in their best interest. Some 25% of all children placed in care enter this system because the State has failed to provide their family with the support they need. These children are not in care because they are being abused; they are in care because the State, we collectively, have not provided their families with adequate homes or the means to support themselves. This must be addressed. We must never again allow children to be removed from their homes under those headings.

Would the State not be better off ensuring such children remain with their families, if it is in the child's best interests do so - I emphasise, therefore, that the child's best interests must be the absolute measurement point in this regard - and provide them with an appropriate home rather than put them in care? Why is the State willing to give a foster parent an allowance of €325 per week but will not provide financial support to keep a family together when it is, in most if not all cases, in the child's best interests to do so? This is unacceptable. When a child enters the care system the State will, as we have all too sadly witnessed, fail them again unless the Government holds this referendum and provides the resources to make the new constitutional rights to children meaningful. A new approach is clearly needed. This is only one aspect of the children's rights debate.

There remains more than 76,000 children living in consistent poverty in this State, with almost 20% of all children at risk of poverty. It is claimed that there are hundreds of children, across all 26 counties, sleeping on our streets at night and that there are thousands of children residing within a care system that is not resourced to the level required to meet their needs. A substantial number of children of the 59,000 families languishing for years on end on social housing waiting lists are living in substandard accommodation that is damp, over-crowded and of general poor quality, which exacerbates the detrimental effects on a child's well-being. Children continue to go to school hungry and to go missing from HSE care. A case in this regard was outlined to the House during the course of this debate this afternoon. Sadly, some of these children are never found. That this remains the case in this State in 2010 is reason in itself to enshrine children's rights in our Constitution and to take a proactive approach to address all other weaknesses within the care and support systems.

Sinn Féin welcomes this report. We fully appreciate the importance of enshrining in the Constitution the rights of children and do not believe that making a symbolic statement within the Constitution is enough. We believe in cherishing all the children of the nation equally and for us this means all children regardless of their family background, whether their parents are married, their economic status, gender or ethnicity. This will not be achieved by the insertion of a mere statement of intent into the Constitution. We believe that all children have a right to education, a home, to play, to be healthy and to feel safe and be heard. The proposed constitutional amendment that we have collectively recommended has in my opinion the potential to affirm those rights.

I am happy to advise the House, as did Deputy Howlin on behalf of the Labour Party, that at last weekend's Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis in the RDS a motion commending the work of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children and committing our party to proactively encourage the electorate's support for a referendum proposal along the lines recommended was unanimously adopted. I welcome that endorsement and end my contribution by urging Government to bring forward at the earliest date possible the natural outworking of our efforts, namely, a referendum proposal that will enshrine the rights of children in our Constitution.

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