MINISTER FOR Children Barry Andrews is “extremely frustrated” at the time it is taking the Health Service Executive (HSE) to provide him with figures for the number of children who have died in care over the past decade, his spokesman said last night.
He was responding to reports yesterday that as many as 200 children may have died in care over the past 10 years. The HSE admitted it does not know how many children have died in State care. It said a review of files is taking place.
The official figure used when referring to the total of child deaths in State care over the decade has been about 23, but the Sunday Business Postreported yesterday the HSE believed that figure to be closer to 200.
However, the HSE in a statement yesterday said “the accurate figure” cannot be confirmed until its review is completed. “As such, reports in the media today are based on speculation and cannot be relied upon,” it added.
In March, Mr Andrews conceded the number of deaths over the decade may have been higher than 23. His spokesman said he wrote to the HSE a few weeks ago asking it to validate the figure of 23 he had used in the Dáil, and he was still waiting for data.
“If the numbers were significantly higher, that would be extremely worrying and there would be serious questions to be asked,” his spokesman said. But, to the best of Mr Andrews’s knowledge, at this point the 200 figure was speculative, he added.
Furthermore, he said Mr Andrews had been frustrated at waiting for a definitive figure from the HSE, and the fact it could not immediately retrieve the data.
Fine Gael’s spokesman on children Alan Shatter said if 200 children have died, it is a scandal of enormous proportions which demanded an immediate response from Mr Andrews. He said since the appointment by Mr Andrews of Norah Gibbons and Geoffrey Shannon to carry out an investigation into the deaths of all children in care since 2000, he had “received information that the numbers of children who have died in care are substantially greater than the numbers given by Minister Andrews in the Dáil this year and by Minister John Moloney in the Dáil in March 2009”. It defied belief that Mr Andrews remained unaware of the number of deaths.
“How could it be the case that so little value was attached to the lives of these children that until now no action was taken to identify and collate the numbers dying in care or to review the circumstances of their individual deaths?”
The latest child to die while in State care was 17-year-old Daniel McAnaspie, from Finglas, Dublin, whose stabbed body was found dumped in a drain on farmland in Co Meath earlier this month.