It is 2024. Ireland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, one of the most educated populations, running a budget surplus with a stable democracy and solid tax-base, yet repeatedly we are hearing that Ireland’s state care system for children is in a state of crisis.
Most recently, we learned that Department of Children officials privately warned the Government may need to consider a “complete overhaul” of the care system for the State’s most vulnerable children due to its current failings. These are children the State is supposed to protect.
Last year, Former Dublin metropolitan District Court judge Dermot Simms wrote to four Government Ministers, Tusla, the State Claims Agency and the Ombudsman for Children warning that up to 130 highly vulnerable children are in “unsuitable” and “unapproved” placements, such as holiday centres, hotels and B&Bs because there is nowhere else to put them. He said “systemic failures” across Tusla, the Garda, the Department of Education, the HSE and the Prison Service are undoing, undermining and frustrating the best efforts of frontline social workers to comply with regulations and protocols.
In some instances, Irish children have had to be provided with special care placements in the UK due to lack of capacity here in Ireland. Mr Justice Mark Heslin recently permitted the transfer of a teenage girl to the UK after hearing the teenager, who is under the State’s care, was regularly absconding from her residential placement, misusing substances and the victim of coercion and suspected exploitation and that An Garda Síochána were investigating men who were, it appears, exploiting her in “the most appalling manner”. He said it was “disgraceful” that the girl had to be sent abroad because there was no appropriate place for her here.
As of July this year, Tusla reported that 40 children in State care were missing and unaccounted for, with 22 of these minors who had arrived seeking international protection. Responding to questions from Meath TD Peadar Toibin, Tusla stated that once a child is reported missing, it becomes the responsibility of the Gardai, and that Tusla ‘remains concerned’ about those who go missing and do not get back in touch.
In 2012, the Government of the time put forward the 31st Amendment to the Constitution, the ‘Children’s Rights’ amendment, strengthening the power of the State and state agencies to intervene in ‘the best interests of the child’. The argument was that the State needed Constitutional authority to intervene when parents were failing their children and that the previous threshold was too high – resulting in too many cases of parental neglect not being addressed by the relevant authorities.
The promised panacea of State power has failed to deliver for children. The assumption, as is often the case, of a utopian and perfect solution to be offered by the State has resulted in dystopian outcomes for children who continue to be let down by authorities.
In Ireland, we remain fixated on the past. The Church is vilified for its actions in a time where there was no all-powerful state; when there was no bottomless pit of financial resources; when there was no one else stepping forward to offer something in the midst of social failure.
Yet today, the majority of people are not horrified by the same failings taking place in front of their eyes, in the present. We, as a people, are eerily quiet as the State – our democratically elected, representative State – fails children, today. We are not outraged. We do not expend the same energy addressing problems that are within our control today as we do shaking our fists at the past.
The Church may have failed – and failed badly in many cases – but so did society, as did the State. Yet, in the here and now, the State continues to fail despite having arrogated power to itself over the lives of children and families in the name of ‘children’s rights’. We appear passively resigned as a people to the continued failures. Is it because we voted for this? We were told the State was the solution and we believed it. Now, there is no one to blame but ourselves. There is no bogey-man Church to project upon. There are no nuns to lambast for their failings. We cannot separate ourselves from a distant past. It is on us, now.