Mary White (Fianna Fail)

I had to look up what the word "redacted" meant in the dictionary. I found this edited report useless. However, it did recommend: "The provision of a national out of hour's Social Work Service structured and resourced to ensure an appropriate response to all serious child protection and welfare concerns." Many people, including the Minister, have said there is no proof that if this service were available this family would not have died. However, that is an intellectual response and argument. As a layperson and having produced my document on suicide, it is clear that even giving a person five minutes of professional time can save their lives. My proposal was that there should be a national 24-hour helpline available seven days a week staffed by psychiatric nurses or social workers who can decide whether an immediate response is required and the person should go to hospital, or whether chatting to them for a while or saying they could go the next day would be adequate. It is savage that we do not have this service. If a person is depressed, we do not have an adequate after-hours service. What good is the doc on call service for a person who is so bad? How accessible are the accident and emergency units during the night? The Monageer report is hopeless in the sense that so many of the conclusions and recommendations are blacked out.

An earlier speaker mentioned the adequacy of the social work service, with which I fully agree. From my experience in business I know the Irish bureaucracy is extremely badly managed. Everybody is left to his or her own devices. Nobody supervises the workers. To manage a social work service we need a supervisor managing a certain number of people and checking on them all the time to see if they are doing their work. It is not appropriate to leave it as a free for all with people doing their thing their own way. Some of them can be brilliant and some will be meandering and nobody getting anywhere.

The bottom line is that we need the full report. Of course I will be voting with my party tonight. However, we need the report published. Hundreds of children are currently at risk. I said this afternoon that separated children in care, children in St. Patrick's Institution, are not supervised. There is no independent supervising. Children's care must become a mantra and the country must not be the hell that The New York Times last week described the Ryan report as showing. We need to get the Children First guidelines carved in stone so people know that our country protects its children. Up to this time we cannot say we are doing that.