The tragic death of a 17-year-old youth while in the care of the State is a symptom of the under-resourcing and mismanagement of the countrys child protection service
HE DIDN'T LOOK like a child who was ready for the rough-and-tumble world of life on the streets.
With big blue eyes and his goofy grin, 14-year-old David Foley was like a kid on a big adventure. He joked and smiled to social workers, wondering whether he'd have to go to school the next day or if he'd have to do homework. It was his first night away from home.
"He was so vulnerable, that's what I remember," recalls one social worker. "He'd these big glowy eyes. It was like he was a comic book character, always talking, always wanting to tell you what he was doing."
"David wasn't ready for the world he was about to enter," says another. "He thought he was streetwise, but he was actually very innocent. He didn't have a clue. Looking back, he was as if he was entering the slaughterhouse, into the lion's den."
Earlier that day, David had turned up at Pearse Street Garda station in Dublin's city centre, saying there was trouble at home and he didn't want to return there. Social workers from west Dublin were called to deal with the situation. He needed a care placement in his community, some family support work or at least a negotiated return home.
None of it happened fast enough. Instead, as two community areas bickered over who was responsible for him over several months, he ended up in an emergency care hostel, known as the out-of-hours service.
It's a notoriously dangerous environment. With little to do during the day, most teenagers at risk in the out-of-hours service end up mixing with older, more streetwise youths on the city's streets. With its brutish sub-culture of begging, mugging, drug-dealing and prostitution, it is guaranteed to squeeze every drop of innocence from anyone who passes through it.
To the gardaí they're known as the "out-of-hours club". They used to hang around Dublin's boardwalk, stealing phones, getting into trouble. Nowadays they hang around Temple Bar or on the streets of the north inner city.
"Youre kicked out at half-nine in the morning and you can't go back till eight o'clock. You've the whole day to waste, do you know what I mean?" says one young person who has come through the out-of-hours system.
"And in the hostel, you'd wake up with a few others. They'd go, 'I'm going off robbing' and 'what are you doing?' You get sucked into the robbing business. Its just a life of f**king crime."
A social worker familiar with David's case says it's the last place he should have been placed.
"Once he was in that service for any period of time, it was inevitable he'd get sucked into drugs or prostitution. I remember him talking to me about hard drugs and he said, 'Who'd do that to themselves'. Two weeks later, he was smoking hash and getting into trouble. Then he turned to drink. It was a downhill struggle after that."
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THE SCALE OF neglect and abuse in society is frightening. Official HSE figures to be published shortly will show there were more than 5,200 children in the care of the State at the end of 2006. Most of these children were in foster care, with others in residential care and a small number in emergency beds.
Child neglect remains the most common reason for children coming to the attention of social services, following the inability of parents to cope with abuse in the family home or behavioural problems with a child.
Social workers find themselves dealing on a daily basis with the silent symptoms of society's failings: trying to help parents who fall through the cracks, linking them in with health and social supports or meeting the needs of vulnerable children whose safety or welfare is at risk.
It's a hidden world of families living on the edge of society, on the edge of the health system and, in extreme circumstances, on the edge of life itself.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) has a primary responsibility under the Child Care Act, 1991, to "identify children who are not receiving adequate care and protection" and to provide them with suitable protection.
Yet, the reality is that the system is operating against a backdrop of scarce resources, staff shortages and heavy caseloads, with many children falling through the cracks.
The Irish Timeshas established that many teams of social workers in urban areas are failing in their statutory duty to protect children, with services dominated by crisis management rather than early intervention.
Files seen by this newspaper show that in a number of community care areas in Dublin and around the country there are anything up to 300 reports of suspected abuse or neglect which have not been followed up. In one community care area alone, abuse referrals have been waiting to be dealt with for up to three years. In reality, say social workers, they will never be dealt with.
Many children in the care system do not have an allocated social worker or any meaningful relationship with a care professional to check on their status. Health authorities say that in all cases where there is a serious and immediate risk to the health or welfare of a child, they respond immediately and take appropriate action.
They add that an additional 335 social work posts have been introduced since the beginning of 2005, representing a 17 per cent increase in the number of social workers employed in the health service.
But social workers say the system is under severe strain and the recent recruitment embargo has exacerbated problems even further. In addition, staff are saddled with the problem of referring vulnerable children to therapeutic services which are burdened by long waiting lists. Hundreds of children in need of psychiatric services, for example, are forced to wait more than a year to see a consultant.
The result, say health professionals, is a system in which children, who could have been helped if support was provided earlier, are being needlessly damaged.
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THE SPEED OF the David's downward spiral into a world of drugs and crime during his first few months in the out-of-hours service was startling.
School was out of the question once the other kids on the street told him he could pick up a social welfare cheque if he didn't attend. Returning home seemed unlikely as he was adamant that no family member wanted him.
"He never wanted to return home from that point on," says one social worker. "He felt he didn't have any family to lean on, so he put all his emphasis into becoming respected on the streets."
Soon his life became a blur of drinking during the day, getting high, shoplifting or stealing mobile phones. He started failing to keep appointments with social workers. When eventually he got a residential bed in a service after being on a waiting list, he didn't seem interested in it.
For a boy with no real history of criminal behaviour, he very quickly racked up serious offences. By January 2003, he was involved in a joyriding accident when he was the passenger in a stolen car. A few months later, he was accused of serious assault.
Drugs, though, were the biggest problem. By the summer of that year, social work staff were becoming increasingly concerned about him.
"He was popping pills left right and centre. He was extremely down in the dumps with life," recalls a health professional who dealt with him at the time.
On one occasion, he admitted to taking more than 25 D-10 tablets (a stimulant normally used for treating ADHD). On another, he said he had taken a large numbers of DF-188s (anti-depressants).
When he found out his girlfriend was pregnant in the summer of 2004, his drug use decreased dramatically for a time. Wanting to fulfil his role as a responsible father, he started to engage with social workers and attended a residential drug treatment programme in Kilkenny for over a month.
The respite was brief, though. After allegedly getting into a row with another resident, he left the programme.
"He got an awful whack when he realised he was going to be a father. He felt he didn't have any parenting skills. A lot of services were made available to him, but it was too late: he was so immersed in the sub-culture that he felt he couldn't cope."
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IT'S CLEAR, THEN, that the child protection system isn't working. So what does work?
For some time, health authorities have talked about shifting resources away from child protection - which tends to deal with emergency cases - towards early intervention in the form of family support services.
Family support is a simple concept: it means identifying the needs of families under strain and providing support with some of the simplest tasks, such as organising a budget, making meals for kids and basic parenting skills, all of which increases parents' capacity to cope.
"It's like a weighing scales," says Pat Dolan, director of child and family resource centre at NUI Galway. "If you put in enough support, it helps parents manage better and deal with whatever problems or challenges they have. But if you don't, the pressure builds up and the scales flip over to the point where there's a major crisis."
The HSE acknowledges that the current system is not working and that it is moving towards providing increased levels of family support.
Aidan Waterstone, the HSE's national specialist on child and family services, says child protection services were developed independently under the previous health board structures, resulting in a vast variability in terms of resources and approaches to care.
He says senior officials are in the process of trying to turn the system around to place a greater emphasis on family support. However, he warns that helping to protect children will need to be a matter for society as a whole. "Family support can be delivered formally through the direct services of statutory, voluntary and community organisations. But it also needs to be delivered informally through the support of extended families, friends, neighbourhoods, communities, parishes and other local networks."
This vision has a long way to go. A HSE report on the adequacy of child and family services to be published soon acknowledges that family support services continue to be hampered by the lack of clear objectives, both nationally and locally, or a management and organisation structure to deliver the services.
Money, too, is a problem. In the long run, though, it's more economical - keeping a child in a high support care placement can cost in excess of €500,000 a year. That much money in family support could help anything up to 40 children, according to HSE officials.
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DAVIDS SENSE OF failure began to grow worse, according to social workers. He was homeless, a drug addict and with no idea of how to parent.
"'How can I ever face my child - I don't want my son to be ashamed of me', he said to me once," a social worker recalls. "He desperately wanted to be a good parent. He was 17 at that stage, still involved with drugs and getting into trouble. He felt every move he made was irresponsible. The baby was eventually taken into care, which devastated him."
The only escape, it seemed, was drugs. He would speak to care workers about the sense of peace and harmony he found while taking them. He knew there were dangers, they say, but the risks he was facing never fully registered with him. "He became lost in that world. He'd say, 'I love being there - I don't want to stay there, but just for a while'."
He overdosed twice in the summer of 2005. He insisted to those around him he wasn't trying to take his own life, but he was fighting a losing battle.
David was found dead on a flat off Blackhall Place in Dublin's north inner city on Saturday, September 10th, 2005.
It was almost three years to the day since he entered the care system as a bubbly, cheeky 14-year-old. He left it hardened well beyond his years, hope drained from him, unable to see any escape from his problems.
The HSE was privately ordered by the minister for children at the time, Brian Lenihan, to conduct an internal inquiry into the care provided to David. Three years later, the report has yet to be completed.
To many social workers who still remember "Davo" with affection, his story illustrates the dysfunction of the care system and the urgent need for earlier intervention with children. If his death is to achieve anything, they say, it's to ensure no child has to endure what he did.
"If family support had been brought in at the start, I think he'd be alive today," says a senior social worker. "It's too easy to put a child in 'out-of-hours' if there's no immediate bed. We have to stop that practice urgently."
"We have buried too many children in this service," says another. "I've seen them go on to prison, the homeless services, becoming heroin addicts or getting involved in prostitution. It's not the fault of these children, they're victims of their circumstances. Yet when we - the State - were expected to step in, we failed. David should have had so much going for him. Instead he was a chance taken away."
• David's story is based on interviews with social workers, professionals who knew him and an unpublished initial internal report by the HSE into the circumstances surrounding his care, compiled several months after his death
