Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)

I commend Norah Gibbons and her team for the work they did on this report. The case is first and foremost a tragedy and our thoughts and prayers must be with the children who have lost the opportunity to grow up in a loving home. We must ensure that all the resources of the State are made available to the six children concerned to come to terms with and cope with their terrible experiences. The failure to listen not only to the children, but those around them such as neighbours and relatives, facilitated this appalling case of abuse. Barbaric cruelty is far too tame a phrase to describe what the children went through and survived, and survived they did.

Not only are they to be commended for speaking up and for giving evidence against their parents, which for them brought back all kinds of terrible memories, most importantly they are to be commended for allowing this report to be published in an attempt to prevent this happening to any other family. The reason I want to acknowledge their agreement to the publication of the report is because the six children have had to relive the terrible isolation of their early upbringing in the family home during two separate court cases. Not only was there the coverage of the cases to contend with and the natural discussion which took place on foot of that, there was also the media vultures encamped outside the homes of the children who tried to exploit the story and who had no qualms about putting these children through a further period of abuse.

I will put a question to the House. Have these children and their families and community not been through enough? Should they be exploited again for profit? I would hope not. At the time of the court cases the story was spun that the wider community must have known what was going on and did nothing about it. It is a fact that they did know and reported it to the appropriate authorities, but their complaints were never acted upon. This report outlines the fact that serious concerns were expressed by neighbours, relatives, members of the public, the school and a garda. The report details at least 19 separate complaints over 11 years which were made to the authorities that were ignored and not acted upon.

Not only must each of the individual children be issued with an apology by the HSE, but also the community which has had to live under a cloud since this case first came to public attention. Each and every member of the community has been tarnished by the inaction of the health professionals who failed to act when confronted with serious concerns regarding these children. This has been fuelled by ill-considered comments by those who wished to divert attention away from the real failings in this case.

Reports are commissioned after cases such as this, yet nothing concrete ever happens. No one ever learns and nothing ever changes. Sadly, I went through the recommendations of the report into the Kelly Fitzgerald case which was produced in 1996. If the recommendations had been implemented, this case would not have arisen. The findings specifically mention supervision orders and assessing the views of children, two fatal flaws in the case before us. Many of the recommendations contained in the report that has just been published are simply common sense and the public would have assumed or hoped that social workers already apply such interpretations, such as speaking directly to the children at the centre of the cases and interviewing those that make complaints. Sadly, that did not happen.

See this speech in context