Children: We Have Failed Them Again

So, another week, another series of revelations. This time they’re about children who were, or should have been, committed to the care of the HSE. There has been yet another failure to protect the weakest and most troubled, this time by the statutory authorities…

The present controversy erupted when Alan Shatter read the report on the death of Tracey Fay into the record of the Dáil. But since then, on a daily basis, other stories have emerged, each revealing how systems intended to protect children failed in their basic mission.
It’s shocking. But for anyone working in social care, youth work or education this barrage is doing no more than letting the population in general know what they’ve been encountering for a very long time.
We’ve already heard of terrible abuses inflicted on innocent victims in institutions funded by the State. But, as many battle-weary social care personnel continuously pointed out, most of the abuse heaped on children happens in families.
A system has long been in place to identify children at risk and to take a series of actions to protect them. In many, perhaps even most, cases it works, but not in all. What we’re hearing about now is how that system has failed some of the most vulnerable.
As usual, there has been much finger-wagging and accusation. Political points have been scored. But there’s a risk of losing sight of the more structural aspects of all this and if we want it to be different we really should be watching them too.
Ireland’s failure to protect children has a deep historical root. For reasons of ideology and national poverty, the nascent State delegated the delivery of education, health and social care services to religious bodies – ”secular” clergy in the case of primary education, orders of nuns, brothers and priests for the rest – and voluntary organisations, many of them also of religious derivation.
For the State, it was cheap and it was a service. And it wasn’t all bad. Many people working in hospitals say that MRSA only established itself after the disappearance of platoons of disinfecting nuns. Likewise, many have nothing but praise for numerous nuns, brothers and priests they met in education.
But neither was it good. And when it was bad it was very very bad, as we have heard many times in recent years as the stones have been turned over and the most gruesome worms revealed.
That was then. The last generation has seen a massive decline in the numbers entering religious life. In parallel, there has been a growing body of legislation enshrining rights and protections for children.
This has meant that more comprehensive and coherent services have been needed and that the State has increasingly had to find and fund its own mechanisms to deliver them. Inevitably they are more expensive – for a start, lay people don’t come as cheap as clerics.
But three other characteristics of the State are also relevant: localism, patronage and procrastination.
Localism is deeply entrenched. Why, otherwise, would we have so many local authorities and councils? Our population is equivalent to that of a large European city, yet while it has one local authority we have upwards of fifty. The result? The effort goes into institutional issues at local level instead of services.
As for patronage, you could write that script yourself! We’ve heard much of it in the last two decades.
And procrastination? Sadly, there’s a deeply ingrained tendency to do things because they must be done rather than because they should be done. To take just one example from tens of thousands, the process of decriminalising homosexuality derived from a European Court judgement, not from any consideration at home. That says a lot about the implicit cowardice of the authorities here.
Localism and patronage gave us the Health Boards. Good or bad they may have been as regards the health aspect of their brief. But it’s hard to fathom why they were also assigned responsibility for services to children, other than as a legacy of the earlier delegation of authority to the religious.
One might equally ask why we have a Department of Health and Children. The two sets of responsibilities are just not compatible. A Minister, and indeed the HSE, has enough to be doing in trying to sort out the medical side. The present national budgetary problems and the public service moratorium mean that critical services for children are treading water in many areas.
In the forthcoming Cabinet reshuffle the Taoiseach might usefully contemplate separating Health and Children, perhaps elevating the office of Minister for Children to full cabinet status and establishing a Directorate for Children’s Services under the Minister’s aegis.
Whatever about that, we need to balance the secularisation of services with a parallel constitutional amendment on the rights of the child and to accompany that with a commitment to deliver on the entitlements that already exist in law.
Things will always go wrong. That’s not at issue. But the acid test of our collective maturity as a society is how we respond when they do. Do we bury mistakes? Do we pass the buck? Do we look the other way? Or do we try to make the future better than the past?
Finding faults is actually pretty easy. It’s far harder to find solutions. And for quite some time now we’ve all been better at the former than the latter. Shouldn’t we now be shifting gear?