Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I, too, thank the Technical Group for sharing time with me.

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this important Bill. At the outset, I would like to comment on the publication of this legislation. As the Minister will be aware, a large number of groups, organisations and individuals have a keen interest in this area and have been working with her and her Department in recent years on the preparation of this legislation. Concern has been expressed to me by a number of those organisations that the heads of the Bill were not circulated to them in advance of finalisation of the Bill, thereby giving them an opportunity to engage on the legislation and to add to it based on their experience, which could only have improved the legislation. It is regrettable that this did not happen. I hope that during the passage of this Bill the Minister will be open to engagement with the various organisations working in this area and to the amendments they propose to table to the Bill in the coming weeks and months.

It is protocol that when a Bill is published, a period of two weeks is allowed to elapse before it comes before the House. It is a basic courtesy and an indication of respect for this House that Members are given an opportunity to consider legislation prior to the commencement of the debate on it. It is regrettable that this Bill was published last Friday and that it is now before the House, with Members expected to have considered it in detail. Given this is a particularly busy time of the year, it is unfortunate that the protocol was not respected and Members were not given sufficient time to consider the Bill.

It is true to say that when it comes to children's services successive Governments have a sorry record in terms of the attention, or lack of it, which they have given to vulnerable children in particular. It is evident from the litany of scandals relating to the serious abuse and neglect of children, and often families, that this has not been a priority area for successive Governments. There has been serious neglect of responsibility at political level in terms of adequately resourcing and prioritising issues relating to children. While many high profile cases have come into the public domain and received a great deal of media and public attention, they have died down in a matter of weeks. It has then been a case of business as usual. Unfortunately, this has been the history down through the decades in terms of issues that affect children.

Children's services have in many ways been the Cinderella services of our health and social services. They have displayed a distinct lack of responsiveness to the needs of children. Whatever about the attention that has been focused on cases of sexual and physical abuse, cases of neglect have been ignored. These cases are usually the starting point in relation to a life of misery for many young people, with many ending up in care, getting into trouble with the law, becoming addicted to various substances, having a difficult life or dying young. There have been too many examples of where this has been the case. This happened because of a complete lack of accountability in terms of responsibility for children's services and a lack of resources, leading to lengthy waiting lists for services.

While the big scandals have grabbed the attention of the public and media, there has been ongoing neglect of early intervention and prevention work. If one deals only with high profile, hard end cases, what one ends up with are cases which start off not particularly serious but which, because of neglect, then develop into serious ones. The principle of prevention and early intervention has never been accepted by the services. Another area of concern has been the lack of equity of access to services. We have not been good at identifying the level of need and providing services that are commensurate with that need. For this reason, areas of socio-economic disadvantage have lost out and been neglected and, in many ways, still are.

The question that must be asked is if this Bill addresses all of those issues. One of the biggest problems currently facing children's services is a lack of resources. Social workers with whom I spoke recently expressed serious concern about the current under-resourcing of services. We are almost past the mid-way point of the year and there is already enormous pressure on budgets. Social workers are expressing serious concerns about the lack of private placements for children who, when all other strategies have failed, they believe require a professional placement or to be taken into care and those placements not being available. In some cases, placements are only available if one child is removed from a placement to make room for another child. It is intolerable that this should be the case.

A serious problem also arises as a result of the high level of social worker vacancies. This is resulting in many social workers having heavy caseloads, inadequate supervision of their work and their being at their wits end in terms of being able to respond to the serious cases which arise on a daily basis. Such is the level of concern of social workers and the Irish Association of Social Workers about the current situation they are raising it with Deputies and Senators this week. This matter requires urgent attention. It concerns me that often when we are speaking in theoretical terms about services for children in the real world many children are at serious risk in home situations from which they should be removed and placed in professional care and children who are already in the care system who are not being supported by social workers because of inadequate resources. This situation cannot be defended at any level. The fact that the country is in recession is no excuse for continuing the ignore the needs of the most vulnerable children in our society.

I welcome that children's rights and needs will be the focus of one agency.

We should not fool ourselves that this will solve the problems as there are pitfalls in having a single focus agency. Two generally accepted principles apply to health and social services. First, services should, to the greatest extent possible, be provided at local, community or primary care level. This has become an established principle because the local, community and primary care levels are considered to be the first line of defence and most effective safety net. The second generally accepted principle in the health service is that services must be integrated. My concern in respect of the new agency is that the approach taken to its establishment flies in the face of the principles that local community care services should be provided through the primary care system and services should be integrated.

In the past decade or thereabouts, the health service has undergone three different major upheavals arising from reconfiguration. I am concerned that we are yet again throwing things up in the air and waiting to see where they will fall, this time in respect of children's services. It is not social workers who generally detect the early indications of difficulties in a family. It is much more likely that a public health nurse, general practitioner or family support worker will identify a problem where children are concerned. While reform of the Health Service Executive is a major undertaking and understandably off-putting for a new Minister, establishing a new organisation in splendid isolation is not a solution either. Services should be integrated. From the point of view of service users, namely, children at risk and their families, the first port of call should be the primary care team, which should then be able to refer on as necessary.

In my constituency, we have a wonderful primary care centre in Ballymun, with multidisciplinary teams that were fully staffed and responding to people's needs. As a result of the establishment of this agency, however, the social workers have been pulled out of the community and removed from the primary care teams. They are now working in a separate building and will work for a separate agency.

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