HSE REACTION:EIGHT HEALTH Service Executive employees were dismissed in 2009 following disciplinary proceedings, the executive confirmed last night.
It released the figures in the wake of concerns, following the publication of the findings of the inquiry into the Roscommon childcare case, that staff are generally never held accountable. It said it could not say at this time how many of the eight staff who were fired, if any, were social workers.
The HSE is now to review whether any staff involved in the Roscommon case should be disciplined. Child law expert Geoffrey Shannon said the results of that review should be published, in order to restore confidence in the child protection system.
He said there had to be accountability for the failure of the health service to rescue the six Roscommon children.
The family to which the children belonged were known to the health services from 1989, after the birth of the first child, up to 2004, when all the children were taken into care.
Mr Shannon, the Government’s special rapporteur on child protection, said nobody listened to the children even though they grew up under the nose of the HSE and nobody asked them for their views.
He said there had been too much deference by health service staff to providing family support in this case.
In a small number of cases families can be dangerous places for children, he said, and professionals assessing this case did not seem to appreciate that the threshold had been reached for getting a court order to protect the children long before the application for an order was made.
He also said constitutional changes would have made no difference in this case and resources were not an issue. The legislation was not used in a timely manner.
Prof Pat Dolan, director of the child and family research centre at NUI Galway, said he was concerned there was no measure of when “enough was enough” in a neglect case, which the Roscommon case was categorised as for years before an allegation of sexual abuse finally led to all children being taken into care.
“The children themselves in the end had to be the whistleblowers on their own abuse. With the amount of professionals that were going into this case . . . something should have been uncovered,” he told RTÉ’s News at One.
Professionals entering the home included social workers, home helps, childcare workers, public health nurses and home management advisers.
Emily Logan, the children’s ombudsman, said the threshold appeared to be too high before children in neglect cases were seen as needing child protection.
She said it appeared in this case that health workers were put off by a High Court injunction sought by the children’s mother in 2000. They could still have sought a care order in the District Court.
“I think that suggests that there was a misunderstanding, perhaps a lack of confidence,” she said.
The case, she added, demonstrated the need to listen to children.
Some 4,766 cases of child neglect were reported to the HSE in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available.