A third of young people experience homelessness within six months of leaving the care of health boards or special schools, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, president of Focus Ireland, said yesterday.
Speaking at the launch of a Focus Ireland report, Out On Their Own: Young People Leaving Care In Ireland, she also said that more than half the young people leaving the care of special schools were in a detention centre within six months.
"These findings," she said, "are clear evidence that the lives of our most vulnerable young people are being wrecked by the authorities which are supposed to be caring for them."
The report calls for a unified system of State child care and an accessible after-care service to support young people in their transition to independent adulthood.
Patricia and Carmel Kelleher, authors of the report, surveyed the circumstances of young people leaving care and, six months later, assessed how they had since progressed. The key reasons for taking a young person into care were because he or she might be at risk of physical or sexual abuse, domestic violence or because of alcohol misuse by one or both parents. Six months after leaving care, 46 per cent of young people were experiencing problems with accommodation, and 32 per cent had experienced homelessness, said Patricia Kelleher, while many also had problems with drugs, alcohol, "anger management" and crime.
The fragmentation of the child care system between three Government departments, she continued, meant there was no co-ordinated child care strategy, no central assessment and placement unit and no co-ordinated follow-up care service.
A young person put into care might be placed in foster care, fostered with relatives or placed in residential care under the Department of Health and Children, in one of the five special schools for young offenders under the Department of Education and Science or in a probation hostel under the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. "Generally, most are placed according to where a space can be found for them, rather than with regard to their needs. "It is the most crazy system I have ever come across," Ms Kelleher said.
