Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat a Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Mar a dúirt an Teachta Jim Daly, tá sé deacair dúinn go léir tuiscint cad a tharla do Grace agus do na páistí eile a bhí sa teach léi. I believe that we are all struggling to find the language but first we must ensure that the commission gets up and running and that its terms of reference are as they should be. As my party leader stated last night, the terms simply must be wider than Grace alone. There were 47 other children in that house.

Under the heading "Care and Decision Making in respect of Others", Mr. Conor Dignam SC has recommended that the commission should investigate a range of matters broader than the Grace case, including all claims made in the protected disclosures that gave rise to the inquiry, the care received by all persons placed in the foster home, including whether they suffered abuse and whether the HSE knew, as well as the use of this placement by another unnamed person. Conor Dignam was initially given the job to make recommendations and these were his recommendations. I believe we need to see the terms widened.

I would like to pay tribute in the Chamber to Deputies John Deasy and John McGuinness, to the journalists and the whistleblowers and to those people who had the courage and tenacity to keep pressing on this issue until we got to the point where the Minister announced that he would be setting up this investigation. We need to get it right. I was in the Chamber last night when it was suggested and the message given out that it was not going to be possible to amend the terms of reference. Some Deputies realised they could and they put in amendments. Other Deputies did not table amendments because they believed they did not have the opportunity to do so. A mechanism needs to be found to ensure the terms of reference for the commission are as comprehensive as they need to be.

We are talking about something awful and how that girl and others were left in that situation without any intervention, despite all the signs and evidence that were there and despite the fact that she went to hospital with bruises. There was no intervention for that vulnerable child, who was all the more vulnerable because she could not express what was happening to her. There were other children in that house who could do so. That is all the more reason why we need to hear from other children who were in that house. We need to get to the truth of the matter for the sake of the children and everyone who is connected to those children, their families and anyone else that knows them and cares about their welfare. We also need to do it for all the other children who are in care, foster care or otherwise, for all the parents who have placed their children in care in good faith believing they would be looked after properly and for all the foster parents who are looking after children and who in the vast majority of cases are doing a really positive and good job.

If we do not get to the truth of what happened in the home where Grace was, then there will always be doubts, a lack of confidence and questions. We have to get to the truth of what happened and exactly why it happened. We have to hold people responsible because there were people who made decisions that allowed Grace and many other children to stay in that situation. If we do not get those answers, then we are not doing justice to all of those children and the people around them, as well as to others who are in situations of care. We have to get back a confidence that the system works well and is properly organised and that when somebody does something wrong or makes a mistake, it is immediately brought to light and righted and things do not get pushed further underneath a carpet because people are afraid of what is going to happen if it all comes out.

It is good that it is all coming out now. It is good that the awful other case we have been talking about this week is coming out, namely, the case of the babies buried in Tuam and other places, which has hugely traumatised many people. If we do not get to the bottom of all of these cases, we cannot build a new system that will work for all children. The Acting Chairman and I have just come from the Committee on Children and Youth Affairs, which was discussing the guardian ad litemlegislation, the importance of justice for children in the courts system and the rights of children in UN declarations, in EU law, in Irish law and in the Constitution. Yet, these are children who are the most voiceless and the most helpless and whose rights in these cases were entirely unvindicated. We to have to ensure we get things right and we will only do that if we get the foundations right. The foundations will not be right if we do not open up what has happened in the past and build a system in which people can have confidence.

I wish to make a point about the current situation. We are aware there are thousands of children in care at present who do not have an allocated social worker. In answers I received to a recent question, it was stated the goal was to reduce that number by 60% by the end of 2016 but it was actually only reduced by 19%. Again, I am not casting blame on anyone. What I am saying is we need to ensure that every child who is in care has a social worker and, therefore, we need to back that with funding. There is an issue around recruitment but we also need to ensure enough funding is allocated to ensure every child in care has a social worker.

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