A few weeks ago the nation was deeply shocked to learn that a 16-year-old girl who had been tortured and raped and abused by her father (now accommodated in prison) was not merely homeless but forced daily to apply for a bed for the night. She had to spend her days on the streets. Small wonder that the nation was shocked, and smaller wonder that the response from too many politicians was evasive, ill-informed and largely irrelevant. One councillor even had the brass neck to suggest that the health boards needed a public relations expert to respond to the situation.
Politics in this State has had very little to offer to troubled children for decades past. Last week in the High Court there was little to be optimistic about. Mr Justice Kelly indicated that he had dealt with 19 children's cases on the Monday, one more on Tuesday and another on Wednesday in which he refused to make an order to continue the detention for 12 months of a sexually abused mentally handicapped boy in a centre which all sides agreed was not suitable for him: it was a unit for offenders and not a therapeutic unit. Mr Justice Kelly expects to be dealing with a further dozen or more cases today. These children could not vote and did not seem to be high on the Minister's agenda, he said. Now the Minister was appealing to the Supreme Court a High Court order compelling him to provide, according to the Minister's own timescale, units for disturbed children.
In fairness, no previous Minister for Health has been either able or willing to provide the sort of facilities which the courts have been saying for decades are required to care for damaged and disturbed children. And, following Mr Justice Kelly's directive that a representative of the Department of Health appear before him on Wednesday, he was told by an assistant secretary of the Department that there was no proposal to build a secure adolescent psychiatric unit because it would run counter to Government policy in the area of mental health services which envisaged a move from hospital to community settings. Is there some reason why such a secure unit could not be provided in a community setting?
Governments' mental health policies, as implemented by the Department and the health boards, have done very little for damaged children for at least a quarter of a century. Have the bureaucrats and the administrators taken over everything? There have been numerous complaints registered by workers in the front line of care for disturbed children that they find great difficulty getting through to their administrators. Maybe there is some prospect of change, given the recruitment advertisements which appeared on Friday seeking numerous staff, from a Director of Homelessness for the Eastern Area Health Authority, to Family Support Workers, Social Workers, Child Care Workers, Nurses, Teachers, Psychologists, Counsellors and more (including new Assistant Chief Executives) for each of the three health boards in the area. Should we hope for better things?
Perhaps. The Minister said he would get the Health Authority to effect improvements in the area. But, given the record of the Eastern Health Board in this area over the past three decades, he will have to forgive people if they wait and see the services working on the ground before they can dare to hope. And he should be in no doubt that the people are on Mr Justice Kelly's side and, therefore, on the children's side. That includes the people who vote.