A “NOTICEABLE population” of children would not be in care if there were adequate family support services in the community, a conference on supporting vulnerable families has been told.
Pat Dolan, Unesco director of the Child and Family Research Centre at NUI Galway, was addressing a conference at the university yesterday.
Prof Dolan said the conference, Family Support, was particularly timely and gave policymakers and researchers an opportunity to reflect on issues raised by the Ryan and Monageer reports and the Baby P case in Britain.
“In light of the Ryan report, it is important to remember there were many kids who were put into institutional care who need not have been there if there were family support services available to their families.
“Even now there is a noticeable population of children in State care who need not be there if there were adequate family support,” he said.
Prof Dolan feared the levels of support to the most vulnerable families would be further cut.
“I sense a panic reaction among professionals, a defensiveness, that is going to make things even worse. Early intervention is being done less as professionals seek to protect the system and themselves rather than the children. There’s a tendency to get into form filling . . . making sure they are covered rather than looking at high-risk cases.”
Fr Aidan Troy gave a talk entitled Walking the Walk in Adversity: Family Support and Personal Discovery. Referring to the Ryan report, he said he came to the conference with a “sense of shame”.
“For some days after the publication of the Ryan report, I was so ashamed of being a religious and a priest that I was paralysed in spirit and lacking the will to do much more than the minimum.”
He said that the issue of not speaking up if something “as heinous as abuse was known remains to be answered by all of us in religious life who lived through those decades”.
He said that he trained as a child school counsellor in San Francisco and came to appreciate the requirement of supervision.
