Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, known as the Ryan report, revealed some dreadful, harrowing and unforgivable mistreatment of children in the care of the State many years ago. Unfortunately, Members can do nothing to bring back the childhood of those young people, who now are adults. All that can be done for them is to provide a certain level of compensation, as well as an apology, to allow them to tell their stories and to provide a level of counselling, advice and so on. However, having spoken to many of the individuals concerned over the years, the most overriding request they have made of Members as parliamentarians is to ensure that this kind of thing can never happen to children again and to ensure that children are properly cared for in the present.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Obviously, what happens to children today is nothing like what happened to the children who were locked up in institutions in the past. However, as the cases of children such as Tracey Fay and Daniel McAnaspie reveal, many children have been failed by the State. It now is known that over the past ten years, 188 children have died, who had been in contact in some way with the child protection services of the State. It also has become evident in the last few days, on foot of a report, that currently many children have not been allocated a social worker and whose care has not been inspected. Many children have been moved around from place to place and do not have anything like the normal securities of a childhood that all children need.

This must be an absolute priority. Governments make decisions and allocate funding on the basis of priorities and this must be contrasted with the speed with which the system moved to address the problems of the banking system when the latter suddenly was in trouble in the autumn of 2008. I refer to the overnight meetings, instant legislation and the availability of billions of euro from the public purse. Saving the life of Anglo Irish Bank was sufficiently important to throw billions into it and I note further billions were added to it recent weeks. However, saving the life of Daniel McAnaspie obviously was not anywhere near as important as saving Anglo Irish Bank. Fundamentally, that is what Members should be discussing today. They should be putting right the priorities on how public money is spent and how public business is conducted. Clearly, the child care service is not at that level of priority.

The Minister of State's script today states:

The plan is very ambitious in what it sets out to achieve. This is deliberate. By setting ourselves clearly identified and ambitious timescales to achieve these actions we are challenging ourselves to meet the standards which we have set for ourselves. That we are doing this in a time of extreme economic difficulty only serves to highlight the commitment of Government to improve services for children in the care of the State.

However, the problem is with the amount of money that is going into child care. I acknowledge that a certain amount of money is being invested and that a certain amount of progress has been made, but when one contrasts that with the urgency with which the problems in the banking sector were addressed by the Government at large, there is no comparison. My colleague, Deputy Higgins, frequently makes the point in the Chamber that a floor of rights is required. Safety nets are needed under which no citizen of this State can fall. Unfortunately, such safety nets do not exist for children in care.

The figures that were revealed last week, as well as the other statistics that have emerged subsequently, particularly in respect of two areas in north Dublin and the report drawn up by HIQA, indicate there is clearly still a huge level of dysfunction within the child care services. I simply do not believe that the sense of urgency to address this exists. This must be treated not simply as business as usual but as a crisis and as something that requires special intervention and a special plan. I share the concerns expressed by Deputy Shatter that the HSE lacks the capacity to do this. I welcome the announcement that there is to be a new supremo who will be in charge of child care services, which certainly is needed. However, can this be done within the manner in which the HSE organises its budgets? I read that as essentially that the person nominated will manage the same budget that is provided for child care at present.

This is not good enough and the same approach must be taken in this regard as was taken in the case of Professor Keane and cancer control, whereby he was told that were additional resources required in respect of shortfalls in the service, they would be provided. With respect to the delivery of cancer care, the child care system is a great deal more complicated. While it may not cause as many deaths as cancer, it is considerably more complicated to organise and I am unsure whether the HSE has the capacity to address its complexities and in particular, to operate a coherent and properly-resourced system.

As for the number of social workers who are being appointed, I understand that out of the total of 270, some 25 already have been appointed. I believe the Minister of State has indicated that 200 additional social workers are promised by the end of this year. However, the appointment of only 25 additional posts right across the system really will not make the kind of difference that is required. Consequently, there must be a prioritisation of this issue at Government level and with respect to the Minister of State, a senior Minister will be required in this regard for some time. While it could be the Minister of State or someone else, someone at Cabinet level will be needed to address this issue. It needs this level of crisis management when one considers what happened to the aforementioned young people. When one looks at photographs of Tracey Fay and Daniel McAnaspie and reads about them when they were younger, it is clear those children had a sense of hope and of having a stake in society. There was a sense they had a future, were engaged with education and so on. Somewhere along the line, the system entirely failed those children and many others like them. At present, many other children are being similarly failed because of the manner in which the system is organised.

A number of actions have been promised in the implementation plan report. Some relate to survivors of child abuse in the past but many of them relate to reorganising and restructuring the system for the future. I wish to read into the record an e-mail. All Members have received a large number of e-mails headed "Please support the Saving Childhood Ryan campaign" and the reason I wish to read it out is because it sets out clearly the points that must be addressed. It starts by stating "[e]nsure that a referendum to strengthen children's rights in the Constitution is held". Clearly this has been promised but there appears to be no indication that such a referendum will be held sooner rather than later. It must be held as soon as possible because once children's rights are written into the Constitution, from that will flow other rights and will flow the necessity to implement measures that will protect children. The children who need the protection of the Constitution are the highly vulnerable children who are being failed at present.

The second suggested action is to "speed up the legislation to place Children First on a statutory basis and widen its remit to include all organisations and individuals, including faith organisations, sports bodies and volunteer groups". The next suggested action is to "ensure children's voices are heard in all matters affecting them". I note this suggestion has been included in the implementation plan and believe it to be highly important. The next suggested action is to "develop the necessary legislative and policy framework to make statutory provision for the right of children's voices to be heard in judicial proceedings affecting them... introduce and progress the National Vetting Bureau Bill, ensuring that the Bill provides adequately for the sharing of information between relevant agencies". Although that Bill has been promised for many years, it still has not been brought to the floor of this House. I believe it is highly important because it pertains to sharing information that is not shared at present and to the protection of children.

The next suggestion is to "ensure all children in care have an allocated social worker and care plan". This is an issue that all Members have addressed already and clearly this is not in place. Hundreds of children who are in care do not have an allocated social worker. Many issues arise in respect of social workers. I feel sorry for social workers who are trying to work within the system because many of them are inexperienced and face extraordinary challenges. Many of the young people concerned have a behaviour that is extremely difficult. While I understand all that, this does not mean that one can somehow suggest this is too difficult and cannot be done. However, social workers must be supported and must be provided with sound structures to support them to enable them to do their difficult work.

The next suggestions are to:

Evaluate the National Children's Strategy 2000-2005 and begin the consultation process in preparation for the development of the next Strategy;

Provide the necessary funding to those providing support services to survivors of institutional child abuse;

Amend the Child Care Act 1991 via the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2009 to place a statutory obligation on the State to provide aftercare for all children who need it and develop a comprehensive national aftercare policy.

That is something on which we are also being lobbied on the Child Care (Amendment) Bill. I hope the Minister will accept that amendment.

The next suggestions are as follows: Ensure that separated children moving into care placements are provided with adequate supports to meet their specific needs; ensure these children have access to aftercare services; publish the promised national review of current practice in relation to Section 5 of the Child Care Act 1991 to establish current practices and gaps in the system for children experiencing homelessness; commence the Health Act 2007 to allow independent inspection of foster carers and all children's residential centres as a matter of urgency [It is amazing that we currently do not have that level of inspection for all children in care.]; grant the Health Information and Quality Authority more independence and robust powers to enforce compliance with child care regulations, through a range of mechanisms, including penalties, sanctions and fines.

Those are the various points that are made. They are all points that urgently need to be addressed. Deputy Shatter referred to Carl O'Brien's report on the situation in north Dublin. In his article Carl O'Brien stated: "The hypocrisy of our society is revealed by the fact that we continue to tolerate the neglect and abuse of children on a daily basis, while we profess shock and horror at the revelations of abuse and neglect of children decades ago."

Today's debate is about learning from the past and implementing the protection that is required for children now and in the future. I wish to ask the Minister of State about a number of elements, one of which relates to the comparative figures that were used by representatives of the Health Service Executive, HSE, during the week. I heard two representatives of the HSE say that the 188 children who died in the past ten years who had contact with the child protection services was commensurate with other comparable countries. I do not know where the representatives got that information or whether it is true, but I would like to know that this was not something that was said in order to make the figures look less shocking than they are. Will the Minister of State indicate what comparative figures were examined?

If we are to learn from the sad cases of all the individual children, each of whom is somebody's child, we need a breakdown of information relating to the years in which the children died, and the areas in which they lived. We found out that two areas in Dublin had particular problems and difficulties and that has remained the case until recently. We must find out exactly what happened to those children and where and when. An overall figure such as we have received does not tell us what the individual circumstances were and what we can learn. We must find out whether there were clusters, if children were let down or whether there was a breakdown of the service in particular areas.

I do not say that because I wish to apportion blame to anyone, but we have to learn from what has gone wrong in the system in the past and what is going wrong currently. I know a number of people who work with children who are in the care of the State. It is extremely difficult work. To what extent will there be a thorough examination of the entire system? The vast majority of children in care are in foster care and they should have the required inspections by social workers. However, a small number of vulnerable children are in other situations, for example, those in high security centres for children with difficult behaviour such as Coovagh House in my constituency, and the kind of children such as Daniel McAnaspie who are in hostels and other such situations. I urge the Minister of State to carry out a full and thorough evaluation of the circumstances in which all of those children are currently in the care of the State. I refer also to children who have come from other countries. There are a number of categories of vulnerable children. I sincerely doubt whether those children are getting the best possible care we could give them. We can learn a lot from other countries where there are better systems.

The catalogue of what we have heard in recent days is a true indictment of the kinds of priorities we have in society, given that we can focus such high-power attention on banks and lavish such a large amount of public money on them yet we cannot provide the resources for these vulnerable children.

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