Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity again in this House to discuss child care and protection issues and, in particular, to look at the progress made since publication by the Minister of State of the implementation plan in respect of the Ryan commission report. One can only conclude that since publication of the report there has been minimal real progress or improvement with regard to our child care and protection services. Indeed, the past 12 months have been marked by a series of scandalous revelations, which clearly shows that the obsessive secrecy that the church was criticised for in covering up instances of abuse is an ethos shared both by Government and by the HSE in covering up the scandalous failures to provide protection to children to which they were entitled.

The Minister of State for some time after his appointment defended our child care and protection services when I described their dysfunction. His out was to say, "We have robust child care guidelines", and then to make a pretence that the service was functional. What has become absolutely clear is that the service is seriously dysfunctional and the Minister of State more or less admitted this in two comments he made earlier. He stated, "What the implementation plan sets out to address is the reality that despite this strong legislative and policy base, service delivery for children in need and children at risk is not sufficiently co-ordinated, is unevenly distributed nationally and must be improved", and he went on to say, "Much more needs to be done to build a strong and responsive service and in my view a fresh approach is required within the HSE in order to deliver the change that we all wish to see". It is as if the Government and the Minister of State are completely separate from anything to do with the delivery of child care services, that they have no responsibility for the disasters and catastrophes of the past decade and here we have this brand new Minister of State who has suddenly discovered there is a problem which he hopes to address.

The truth is, despite publication of child protection guidelines in 1999, no coherent structure was ever put in place to ensure the high ideals of those guidelines were properly observed. No proper management was put in place within a Department to oversee implementation of the child care guidelines. No proper communications system was put in place within either the former health boards or the HSE to even facilitate the maintenance of proper records with regard to children reported to be at risk, the decisions taken with regard to such reports and the action subsequently taken where children were found to genuinely be a concern. No systems were put in place to ascertain where reports of risk were received but were not acted upon or where there was an assessment that, despite the report, there was no need for intervention to find out what happened to any of those children later. No quality controls were there to identify where mistakes were made and, even more extraordinary, no detail was maintained, not even a statistical detail, of children who tragically died who were either in the care system or who were said to be "of concern".

Very little has changed. It has taken scandal after scandal and a drip-feed of information for us to formulate the extent of the dysfunction within our child care and protection services for which this Government is responsible. This Fianna Fáil-led Government and its predecessors were responsible for the creation of the HSE. The Minister for Health and Children steered through this House the legislation that transferred child care and protection services to the HSE from 1 January 2005 and then washed her hands of the service and took no interest in it. Both the current Minister of State and his predecessors essentially saw themselves as policy gurus who would pronounce on high on policy issues relating to children and rely on the goodwill of the HSE to inform them of what was going on. They now know what was going on. We now know it is estimated - I do not believe these figures are accurate and I have said that in the past - 188 children who died were either in care or their care was a matter of concern to the HSE. A total of 102 died as a consequence of what are known as "non-natural causes", of whom ten were identified as dying as a result of assault or murder. This is the care the State provided to children at risk.

This is the number of children it has taken 16 months to even ascertain. I read with some interest the Minister for Health and Children saying that, "Deputy Andrews has been striving since March 2010 to get this information". In March 2009 I sought that information in an Adjournment debate in the House and I was told the HSE was compiling it. The only reason that information finally came to public notice was Fine Gael published the report into the tragic death of Tracey Fay.

What has happened over the past 12 months? The Ryan report implementation plan promised us 270 additional social workers for our child care and protection services. In one part of the document published, it says that they will all be recruited by the end of December 2010 while, in another part, it says somewhere between 2010 and 2011. Since the publication of the implementation plan, 25 of the 270 social workers have been recruited. To what extent is that prioritising children at risk and ensuring we have the services available to them?

There is great concern that those working with children be subject to vetting. In September 2008, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children recommended vetting legislation for the use of soft information be published by December 2008. Where is the Bill? We do not even have heads of a Bill. Nothing has been published. There is no possibility that the legislation will become law until at least this time next year. What about the Garda vetting bureau, which voluntarily carries out vetting of what I would described as "hard information" both for schools and voluntary agencies and other bodies employing people working with children? Unfortunately, because of the huge pressure its staff are put under by the large number of groups, organisations and schools seeking vetting, there is a 14-week delay in getting information when one seeks to ascertain whether an individual is suitable to work with children. There is no sense of priority of any description.

Where are we today with the child care provisions? Only yesterday, Carl O'Brien of The Irish Times yet again revealed problems within our child care services. I refer to the dysfunction within the foster care service. I recall the Minister of State telling us there might be problems in the residential area but foster care is fine. We now know there was an utter failure to apply the child care guidelines to ensure both in the HSE Dublin north west and Dublin north central areas children in foster care were properly dealt with. Inspectors reviewed 1,114 files regarding 803 children in foster care and the main issues arising from this extensive audit were the inaccuracy and unreliability of information, unresolved child protection-child welfare issues, poor quality of records and inappropriate placement of children in supported lodgings. Approximately 500 possible unresolved child welfare issues were identified. The review of the files indicated possible child protection concerns relating to 76 different children. Foster parents were not properly assessed, children did not have social workers allocated to them with whom they could communicate and child care plans were not in place. What was clear was the absolute and abject failure to provide through the child care services to foster children the type of protection to which they are entitled. That was in 2009 and 2010. I have before me a letter sent to the Minister of State on 1 February 2010, detailing what occurred.

Some of this is shocking. On 14 November 2009 HIQA wrote to Professor Brendan Drumm raising some of the issues. These include information on children in foster care held randomly on hard copy files and on the HSE's SWIS system of social work activity; no policy to guide which system should be used for different recordings; no consistency of recording of information; files stored unlocked in unsecured rooms in buildings shared with other organisations. The latter is interesting. The HSE, when asked to reveal its failures, constantly tries to avoid disclosing information based on its commitment to confidentiality in the interests of the child. However, the HSE was prepared to store files and information, unlocked in unsecured rooms in buildings, in relation to children in foster care where those buildings were shared with other organisations.

The files, to quote from the letter to Professor Drumm, contain unsecured loose leaf information that are not in an organised order, and are falling apart. There are files missing, notes are often not dated nor signed and there are a number of items belonging to children, for example photographs, letters and a baby bracelet that have fallen from the files, with no identification to attach to the file or the child. This was a disgrace.

The Minister of State was first informed of the problems within those two areas with regard to fosterage by a letter dated 15 October 2009, and he concealed that information and did not inform this House as to what action he was taking, or the HSE would take. I would say to the Minister of State that the constant drip-drip of revelations is undermining public confidence in our child care services.

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