Chai Brady
Tribunal of Inquiry needed to investigate state and ministerial neglect of kids
100,000 children or almost twice the number of children who will do the Leaving Cert this year will be referred to Tusla, the State-run Child and Family Agency, amid chronic underfunding, missing children, lack of beds, in the ongoing crisis of State care of children in Ireland. Barrister and commentator Maria Steen has called it “a national disgrace”.
“The State care system for children in this country is a contradiction in terms. The most vulnerable children, oftentimes neglected by families in the grip of drugs, crime, unemployment and relationship dysfunction, are farmed out to State agencies in the false belief that they will be better off. The reality is that the State makes for a cold mother. Children need full-time love and care. They need parents, a role that care workers working to a schedule (even if their working conditions were to improve), simply cannot fulfil with the best will in the world. Periodic checking-in is not parenting. A temporary hostel is not a home. Children need a loving, stable environment in which they can flourish – especially children who have already experienced trauma in their lives. Instead, many live in completely unsuitable environments where their wellbeing and education is neglected, where they are easily exploited and prostituted, with many becoming addicted to drugs. Most feel alone and brokenhearted. This is a national disgrace.”
The leader of Aontú Peadar Tóibín told this paper that he blames the Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman for the crisis. “I think the minister has been asleep at the wheel. Everybody involved in the sector has been screaming for change for the last number of years. We have even seen judges lift their heads above the parapets to send the minister documents in relation to the crisis that is unfolding in these special emergency accommodation units and the minister has been stonewalling all of these efforts to try achieve change.”
He added: “Children are going missing. Some of these children are being preyed upon by gangs involved in sexual exploitation. I think a tribunal investigation is going to happen in 5-10 years and yet it is unfolding in real time, in the minister’s time and he is statuesque in terms of action.
Mr Tóibín said the Minister would be the very one calling for a Tribunal were he not the Minister responsible. “I have no doubt if this happened in the past, people like Roderic O’Gorman would be jumping up and down looking for a tribunal of investigation and looking for redress and yet Roderic O’Gorman is himself the reason why there is no movement in this horrendous situation. It is so frustrating, we’ve been raising this week in week out for three years and 201 children have died in the last 10 years, many of them murdered, many them by suicide, overdoses and car accidents or other accidents while either in the care of State services or known to the State services.”
Mr Tóibín said that because the children are from disadvantaged backgrounds they get ignored. “I think if these children were from the leafy suburbs where many of these ministers represent there would be reform and action on this years ago, but because many of these children are from the most disadvantaged areas from very broken families and have no voices to represent them, the Government is ignoring them.”
Bishop Niall Coll of Ossory echoed this sentiment and added his voice to the concern. “Revelations over many years about horrendous shortcomings in the existing system of State special care for children (who are often highly traumatised) are normally bracketed and soon ignored by Irish society. Indeed, most Irish people seem blissfully unaware of the tremendous pressure under which the people who work in this sector labour. I very much welcome the focus that is now being brought to this matter and hope that government, policy makers and wider society will be stirred to make the wider reforms – not least in terms of budgets and the provision of properly trained personnel – that are urgently required in the area of special care.”