Major review of childcare services urged to cope with crisis

A "root-and-branch" examination of the childcare system is vital if we are to arrest the growing number of children coming into an over-stretched care system, according to Focus Ireland's director of services.

Ms Orla Barry also says the children coming to the attention of her staff are "younger and more damaged" than they have ever been. Two years ago the Loft - a drop-in centre for out-of-home young people in Dublin - was seeing people aged 16 and over, it is now seeing them "any age, as young as 12", she said.

Many have run away from care or from a dangerous home situation where monitoring by the social services has failed, says Ms Jean Rafter, who runs the Loft. "The community care services are hugely under pressure and social workers tend to prioritise younger children. So the older children and teenagers get neglected."

When the care plans for children in residential care or in the home break down, she says, "there is almost never a facility to intervene and to pick that child back up again". She is echoed by social workers with the Eastern Regional Health Authority who spoke to The Irish Times, but who did not want to be named.

They describe the child protection services as an "absolute disaster, rushing about putting out fires" where "the problems are getting worse and the children in deeper crisis". Some 3,984 children were taken into care in 1998, the highest proportion aged between six and 12, most for reasons of neglect (1,064) or their parents being unable to cope (1,059). The number in care has risen steadily in the past decade, with the proportion taken into care with a court order more than doubling. The number of social workers employed has risen only slightly in that time.

One Dublin social worker said numerous children allocated social workers rarely saw them - such were social workers' case loads that they could not give cases the attention they needed. They often worked until late at night and the burn-out rate was "frightening".

Ms Rafter refers to the "fragmented and unco-ordinated" approach to individual cases and the inconsistency of personnel dealing with them.

"There's a chronic lack of clarity about who is actually responsible for making decisions about an individual child. If a social worker steps in, the care plan breaks down, who takes responsibility for that kid? He or she gets lost," she says.

"That's when many come to us and to be honest, once they come to us there is a sense among overstretched social workers of `Thank God, that's one I don't have to worry about'. But we're not a statutory body. We can't make decisions for that child."

The two most recent studies of the Irish childcare system were carried out by the Eastern Health Board with the union IMPACT in 1998, and by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, also in 1998. The EHB/IMPACT report spoke of a "crisis in staff morale", "a crisis in the availability of placements for children", and a service "crisis-driven at all levels". The UN report made criticisms on a wide range of child-protection issues. Among them: a lack of any "comprehensive, national policy", an inadequate emphasis on "measures of a preventative nature" and a "lack of adequate co-ordination among those bodies promoting and protecting the rights of the child".

On a practical level little has changed in the child protection services in two years, according to Mr Robbie Gilligan, academic co-ordinator of the Children's Research Centre in Trinity College.

"The social picture in Ireland has changed so rapidly and every new development - whether it be drug abuse, AIDS, asylum seekers, the housing crisis - all have strong child protection implications. The child protection services have been left reeling. There has been little if any planning and little sign of any."

He is echoed by Mr Owen Keenan, director of Barnardos.

"The very fact that most of the young people coming before the High Court have been in care for a considerable time poses serious questions about the effectiveness of the conventional care system," he says. "An analysis of the care histories of these children and young people would be an obvious starting point in identifying factors which led to their becoming out of control. But there is little evidence of any systematic review."

Mr Gilligan says the current review has been gearing up for about 20 years, since the appointment of a task force in the 1980s. It produced recommendations which led to the Childcare Act 1991, which was not implemented in full until 1996. The Government and agencies, he says, "are now reaping the fallout from a whirlwind of neglect".