The short life of Daniel McAnaspie

Daniel McAnaspie, the first child to be killed while in State care, ran not from his family, they say, but from the system that was supposed to look after him. The voices calling for that system to change are growing louder and louder

WHATEVER WAY the State failed Daniel McAnaspie – and in the seven years he spent in care before he was killed, last February, there is no doubt the system badly let him down – he always had his family. A white candle in his aunt Ann-Marie’s home in Ballymun, in north Dublin, bears his picture and a few lines from the Snow Patrol song Run: “Rise up, Rise up / As if you have a choice / Even if you cannot hear my voice / I’ll be right beside you, dear.”

Jangling noises punctuate the silences and the conversation in this well-kept house: big jewellery in the ears of Daniel’s sisters and his aunts. Bangles on their arms. Keys in their hands, twisted unconsciously, as they tell the story of the short life of their brother and their nephew, who went missing from Blanchardstown, on the northern edge of Dublin, and was found, having been stabbed to death, last weekend in a ditch in Co Meath.

Nerves. They jangle so much that at one point his sister Cathriona McAnaspie says quietly that she “can’t do this any more”. It’s not just Daniel’s story she is telling. Most of the McAnaspie family have experience of the care system, and some of them had to care for Daniel themselves under difficult circumstances when the HSE could not find a place for him, which was often.

Daniel McAnaspie was the first child to be killed in the care of the State. He was 17. More than 20 other children have died in care over the past decade. On the night of February 25th he ran away from his temporary accommodation in north Co Dublin – Daniel McAnaspie’s childhood homes were always temporary – to be with friends in Finglas before going to a party in Blanchardstown. There appears to have been some kind of fight. His body was found in a drain on farmland by a local landowner.

The teenager had been in care since the age of 10. His father died seven years earlier, and his mother had struggled to bring up six children on her own. Five of them, three girls and two boys, were put into an HSE care home with their mother. The eldest sibling, a child of almost 16, was, for a reason unknown to the family, not included in the subsequent care arrangement. The care home was, initially, a “voluntary” move, says Cathriona, who was 14 in 2003, when she and her siblings left the family home.

Soon afterwards their mother went away to receive treatment for alcoholism. The family was told that their house in Finglas would be redecorated and that when she came back they would all go back there together. When the treatment was over her mother was not allowed back into the care home. “We had weekly access visits, but that was it. My ma left us and was never allowed back,” she says.

The trauma of being left without their mother affected each of them differently. “I started drinking heavily,” says Cathriona, “the younger kids started playing up a lot.” Eventually, Cathriona became “too much trouble” for the staff in the home, and she had to move out.

Securing a place in a girls’ hostel, a facility that was not run by the HSE, in Ballymun saved her life, she says. She stopped drinking and did her Leaving Cert. Her younger sister Nikki, who had also started getting into trouble, was also asked to leave the HSE-run home when she was 14 and followed Cathriona into the hostel. One by one the other children left the home, settling with members of the extended family. Daniel’s younger brother was placed with Pamela, one of his many aunts. By then only Daniel and his youngest sister, who has special needs, were left in residential care. This was the start of Daniel being moved “from pillar to post”.

IN 2007 THE CHILDREN’S mother died. Daniel started hanging around in town and was attacked in one incident. After being moved to another care facility he went to live with his aunt Sabrina.

Daniel was 14 but couldn’t read or write, and Sabrina was desperate to get him into another school. His aunt Edel, who now looks after another sister, says Daniel wanted to learn. “He was really eager. It used to frustrate him that he couldn’t read; he’d look at his younger brother and say: ‘You are doing great; I want to do that.’ ” The family say Sabrina had little or no support in terms of getting schooling for Daniel, known as Dano by the family.

“There was nobody knocking on her door, asking: ‘Why is Dano not in school?’ Nobody came near Sabrina,” says Cathriona. Eventually, Sabrina managed to get Daniel on to a Fás woodwork course, but that fell apart when he had to read aloud in front of the class. He was embarrassed, the frustration grew and the family say he started “acting out” on that frustration.

Sabrina felt abandoned by the HSE, left to cope on her own with Daniel, despite having two other children of her own to look after. The other aunts feel the same. For years Edel had been promised more spacious accommodation to house Daniel’s sister and her own two children; Pamela says there has been little or no contact with the HSE in recent times, despite the fact that she has been fostering Daniel’s younger brother for five years.

“I did get a phone call today,” she announces, and they all laugh grimly at the timing of the call. “They wanted to know can they come out to see me, which is funny, because I haven’t seen anybody all year. The only response I ever get is that they know he is happy with me, but just because he was happy five years ago doesn’t mean anything. He could be killing me. I could be killing him. They never check up.” It’s at this point that Cathriona says she can’t talk any more.

“They always threw Daniel to us,” continues his aunt Ann-Marie. “They knew we would take him in, but it got to the stage where we told them: ‘We can’t do it any more. We are asking you to take responsibility of him now.’ But they couldn’t do it.”

IN THE YEAR BEFORE Daniel died, the family estimate, he was in 20 different care placements. There were many times he had to use the out-of-hours service, waiting at night in Garda stations for a bed to be free. The family began to worry about his welfare even more than usual.

Three weeks before he went missing Cathriona and Ann-Marie went to a meeting with the HSE about their younger sister. “Daniel came up in the conversation because that weekend he again had nowhere to go. We said: ‘Something is going to happen to him out on the streets. You need to get him in somewhere permanent; he needs help’ . . . I asked for Daniel to be locked up, not somewhere rough but somewhere he could get the help he needed. They said places like that ‘didn’t meet Daniel’s needs’,” says Cathriona, an intelligent and articulate young woman who can’t keep silent on the subject of her brother for long.

“We were worried about him. They said he wasn’t wild enough to be locked up, but every placement he had been in had broken down because Daniel would do something – break a window or something. He was never violent to staff, never, but if he wasn’t in trouble then why did they take him out of all those placements?”

“Daniel would have been 18 this year,” she says. “I think that they were waiting for that day to come so they could say: ‘Daniel, you are 18 now. There you go: you are another street boy. You go on, take drugs, do whatever. Our doors are closed to you now.’ Basically, that’s what I think was going on.”

SHE HAS ANOTHER THEORY based on her experiences in the care system. “I am not dissing good children, but the way I see it the HSE stick with good kids and the bad kids they don’t want to know. They did it with me. They didn’t want to know me . . . I could have been on drugs today. They just let me go out the door instead of saying ‘Look, we can do this’ or ‘We can do that’ or ‘We can make a plan.’ ”

The family say that in the months leading up to his death a social worker, with the backing of local gardaí, had been trying to get Daniel into a residential home in Sweden for troubled children. “Daniel really wanted to go – it would have been a new life – but the HSE fought against that in court,” says Cathriona. They say that in recent times Daniel was calling out for help. That he knew when he turned 18 he would be on his own.

THE DAY WE MEET marks the first anniversary of the Ryan report. Daniel McAnaspie’s story, the story of his family, brings into sharp relief the State neglect outlined in that report. Earlier this month a report into the childcare system by the Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan, was damning of the HSE.

The report found the agency had failed to properly implement child safety guidelines, pointing to the lack of external inspection or internal auditing of child protection services. “The HSE strategic review should consider if childcare services are best delivered by the agency,” the report recommended.

The in-camera rule governing childcare court cases has meant the inner workings of the system remain largely hidden. Fergus Finlay, chief executive of Barnardos, says there is an urgent need for transparency in how the HSE deals with profoundly vulnerable children.

About 5,000 children are in care here, many living chaotic lives.“We have had a tradition in this country, and it’s true in the case of our child protection system, that as long as you fit into a round hole then everything will be smooth,” says Finlay. “Children who do not fit in are a thorn in the side of a system which is slow to adapt to their needs and to support their needs. It’s a system that’s much happier to try to hammer them into a round hole.”

He says that if Daniel McAnaspie was in a country such as Canada, then from an early age a plan would have been developed for his education and general development. There would have been monitoring of his progress – both in and outside of school. There would have been somebody checking on how the various elements of the plan were proceeding. “And this would all have been the responsibility of one person, not the supply of every aspect of the plan, but the overall monitoring and assessment. We simply do not apply that strategy here,” he says.

The HSE has said “lessons must be learned” from the Daniel McAnaspie case and that it is in the process of recruiting 200 additional social workers this year. “I don’t know how many times we’ve been promised them,” says Finlay.

IN SCOTLAND LAST October two teenage girls who were in care jumped off a bridge together and fell to their deaths. At the time Ian Milligan, assistant director of the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care, spoke of the pain experienced by children in care institutions. “We have to try to understand the depth of emotional trauma they have experienced. We already do that, but this incident has heightened the need to be aware of their backgrounds and the troubles that young people in care carry around with them.”

Daniel never let a day go by without contacting some member of his family, so they knew something was wrong when they didn’t hear from him. “I’d say when he went missing the HSE were thinking, It’s Dano, he’s ran around loads of times, he’ll be back after the weekend. Yeah, it’s true, he ran from them. But Dano never ran from us – never,” says Cathriona.

As they wait for his body to be returned to them, they remember Dano their brother, their nephew, their cousin, a young man who was “really, really funny”, “loved all his cousins, loved them” and was obsessed with the rapper Tupac. “He always had his hood up, wanting to look like him,” Pamela says with a laugh. He had “a good heart, a heart of gold”. They remember Christmas last year, when the whole scattered family came together for dinner and Dano made everyone laugh as usual.

The HSE was asked to respond to the grievances of the McAnaspie family but said the Child Care Act prevented it from commenting on individual cases. In a statement earlier this week it announced plans to review the death in accordance with recently published guidelines. This would be an internal review, but the family are calling for a public inquiry, one in which they are fully involved. In a way Daniel was lucky, they say. He always had his family, but in the end even that wasn’t enough.

Cathriona is angry. She says she will spend the next few years forcing the HSE to “face up to what they did to my brother”. It might, she says, save another child’s life. She is a young woman you could imagine emerging as a voice for the thousands of voiceless children in care.

“We are not saying they killed him,” she says. “We are saying if they had listened to us Daniel would be here with us today, because he wouldn’t have been in Finglas or in Blanchardstown: he would have been getting the help he needed. I am not saying they actually did it to Daniel, but they had a part in it, and they need to take responsibility for that.”