Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This Government is acutely aware of the decades of neglect of Irish children and has sought to take real action to address the serious inadequacies which our care system has long had. The House needs no reminding of the horrific and systematic abuse which took place in a home in Roscommon. It shocked our nation and the Dáil and this country committed to ensuring that such abuse of innocent children should never happen again in this country. The Roscommon child care inquiry, which was published in October 2010, catalogued a number of concerns arising from the examination of the management of systematic and problematic neglect in a family known to the HSE's child protection services.

Since this Government came into office and Deputy Frances Fitzgerald took up her role as Minister for Children and Youth Affairs in 2011, there has been a huge amount of change underway in children protection services. A new model for family-based multi-agency assessment and early intervention has already been trialled in two regions and is being mainstreamed as part of the establishment of the new Child and Family Agency. Last summer, shortly after the report was completed, HIQA published standards for inspection of the HSE's child and family services in respect of its child welfare and protection services. The Children First guidelines have been updated and the Minister is working to place those guidelines on a statutory basis and that legislation is to be published shortly. We have established the child and family agency, which will be a dedicated agency with dedicated staff to establish national standards.

In regard to the issue of social workers, the latest figures from the HSE indicate that there are currently 1,390 whole-time equivalent social workers in child and family services.

This includes all 270 additional social workers recruited in line with the detailed recommendation of the Ryan report implementation plan of 2009. The recruitment of these posts was completed in full by this Government and these posts were not subject to the public service recruitment moratorium. Social work figures are consistently in flux, with vacancies arising due to various reasons such as leave, etc., but the Government is overseeing an ongoing programme of active recruitment to fill vacancies. Some 94 vacancies have recently been filled and further 81 are currently being filled.

The new programme of independent HIQA inspections is also under way in line with the first ever national standards for child protection services, which has been initiated by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Fitzgerald.

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