Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank my cousin and esteemed colleague for sharing time with me. The Minister of State is welcome. It is difficult to imagine how one can take something positive out of the dire and disturbing set of revelations that has emerged. During a brief period of my life I taught social care on a social care programme in the Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown, and one of the buzz phrases that came up time and again was the notion of a reflective practitioner - somebody working in the area of social care being reflective on the job and how he or she does the job. The other concept I remember was that of avoiding models of care that were oppressive. What we have seen are sad examples of practitioners of social care who are not reflective, and have not been reflective, and social care that has been oppressive.

All of us are far beyond the stage where we believe there are only good people and bad people or that institutions are made up of only good people or bad people. We are beyond the stage of thinking that everything was great in the past - we know it was not - and that everything is rosy now; we know it is not. What we can say, however, is that we must first ensure that the law applies where people have committed an offence, whether it is withholding knowledge or whatever. What has come forward in this documentary constitutes evidence, and that evidence has to be used in the appropriate way by the civil authorities in the context of criminal investigations.

Second, we have to recognise that care plan norms only go so far. We need people who have a sense of ethics. There was a time when we would talk about basic Christianity. We can use a wide phrase but the idea of loving and caring in a special way for the most vulnerable has to be recovered, and one cannot just learn that in a college course or through a box-ticking exercise. We must get back to the concept of ethical treatment of other people.

I will leave the Minister with a positive comment, and I thank her for her indulgence. In the same place in Swinford something very positive is happening. A new treatment for autism, the rapid prompting mechanism, RPM, is being practised and explored by families and it has been a liberating experience for children with autism who are now enabled to communicate their feelings. A child describing how he felt before using RPM said he was terrified but now that he can express himself he now describes himself as liberated because he can communicate his ideas and feelings. Not everybody we are talking about has autism but I suggest this is a very positive development that I have already raised in this House with the Department of Education and Skills. We could have the Department explore what can be done to assist children with autism who might benefit from the rapid prompt mechanism system of treating autism. It is very exciting for the parents and families involved, and for the teachers involved. How ironic and instructive that it should be going on in Swinford among other places. I ask that that issue would get attention in these days.