Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

I am making a general point that the House is able to give more than three hours for Report Stage of a Bill dealing with road traffic and we have been given three quarters of an hour for Committee and Report Stages of a Bill dealing with the welfare of children and children who have died in the care of the State. It seems this is an unbalanced use of parliamentary time. I have to ask which is more important. Why should more than three hours be given to one Stage of a Bill dealing with road traffic and three quarters of an hour in total given to Committee and Report Stages of a Bill dealing with children who have died in the care of the State?

However, this Bill is progress and I do not wish to sound churlish about it. It is designed to facilitate the operation of the independent group comprising Geoffrey Shannon and Norah Gibbons to carry out a full review of the deaths of children in the care of the State. To that extent, I do not wish to impede the progress of the Bill in any way. It is vital the review team is given the access to the information and files it requires in order to carry out this review. However, the group is forced to take a circuitous route by accessing this information from the HSE by way of the Minister of State's office. The HSE can decide that relevant information should be given and volunteer to provide it and supply to the review group by way of the Minister of State's office or the Minister can request the HSE to hand over certain information to the review group. One of the main points made by the Ombudsman for Children is that, either way, the independent review group does not have the power to demand the files it requires to carry out the review. This is a fundamental failing.

The Minister of State will have taken legal advice and he may well say it is not possible to do this under current legislation and that further legislation may be required to give the review the full powers to access the information it requires rather than be forced to go through the Minister of State's office to the HSE. In my view, public confidence would be increased if the group could access the information directly and if it was empowered to publish its report upon completion. The Minister of State has said the report will be published and this is to be welcomed. The public need to get all the available information.

Dr. Siobhán Barry, a clinical psychologist, has stated that, in her view, the Children First guidelines should have required this information to be automatically transferred in any case. The Child Care Act 2001 is being quoted as the reason the Government was given the advice it could not deal with this issue without introducing the legislation today. Dr. Barry suggests that, because the primary interest of children is paramount, the Children First guidelines should have obliged the HSE to hand over the files to the independent review group without the need for legislation. If the Children First guidelines were statutory rather than non-statutory provisions, they would at least have had parity with the Child Care Act 2001. If these guidelines were statutory provisions, the issue in the Child Care Act 2001 would have been required to be dealt with in the House. I ask the Minister of State when the Children First guidelines will be put on a statutory basis.

Other issues raised in the context of this Bill include the issue of the in camera rule. The Minister of State in his contribution last night referred to Carol Coulter's review of the family courts and the effect of the in camera rule. There has been a widespread debate about the effect of this rule. Information of public importance and to the good of vulnerable children is not available because of the in camera rule. It is the case that no appropriate record exists in the family courts to allow information be used either by the media, policymakers or public representatives who are people who have the interests of children at heart. The very valuable information available in the family courts could be used for the development of policy in this area and in the interests of children.

I know the Minister of State has an interest in this regard and I would like to see some progress as it has been discussed for a long time. There seems no reason not to have more information available for policymaking than what is currently available from the family courts. The in camera rule was never designed to preclude this kind of information from being used. It is designed to protect the identity and interests of children and other vulnerable people in the context of family law cases. This issue needs to be addressed quickly.

We all want to see this review carried out as quickly as possible with the full information required. Both Mr. Shannon and Ms Gibbons have stressed that this review is about learning lessons from what happened in the past and to ensure that procedures are put in place for the future so that children in care are properly cared for and they are not left vulnerable to go to Garda stations at night in order to seek shelter. In some of the cases highlighted, young people were in and out of all sorts of different care provision facilities and completely inappropriate situations and with nowhere to go during the day time. They were not protected from adults who preyed upon them in a variety of ways and ultimately, for example, this led to the death of Daniel McAnaspie and other heart-rending cases of young people in care who simply were not cared for.

Last week during a debate the Minister of State correctly made the point that prevention is crucial in all these situations and early intervention is much more valuable than crisis management. However, we still have a crisis management situation in our child care services. I wish to highlight situations in which if a young person has problems, he or she only obtains intervention when the problem becomes almost insoluble because things have gone so far. We need to be able to intervene with families at an early stage so that a problem does not become so great that it is insoluble and in many cases, it is the law rather than the welfare services that intervene. There will be some opportunity, but not nearly enough, to tease out the issues in this Bill on Committee and Report Stages. We need a lot more time to deal with this because it is extremely important for the future welfare of vulnerable children in our society.

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