Sir, - Alan Shatter (The Irish Times, February 5th) accuses me of being "disingenuous" in arguing that the failures to protect the McColgan children can only be understood if placed in the context of the quite different era of child care that existed then. Yet he fails to address in any meaningful way the substantive point that I made in my article concerning the relative lack of knowledge of child abuse during the 1979-84 period when the McColgan case was open, the different norms of good practice of the time, the relative lack of accountability in the system then, and the negative impact of inadequate child protection laws and procedures then operating on how such cases were handled.
He thus exhibits precisely the lack of perspective, errors of judgement and distortion of historical realities that I drew attention to in my original article. The only substantive evidence he presents to support his argument that child abuse was widely enough known about then to lead us to reasonably expect that protective action should have been taken by the health board is the two cases that came to light between 1980 and 1982 in which children were killed by parents while the cases were under the supervision of Health Boards. What he failed to point out was that these cases were in fact the subject of a modest investigation by the then Minister for Health, Dr Michael Woods. His report, which ran to just four pages, concluded that the social workers and other professionals "acted, as individuals, in a concerned and conscientious manner. Nevertheless, it would appear to him that they did not initially work cohesively as a team with full communication of the facts and co-ordination of efforts." This finding had a major impact on the direction of the 1983 edition of the Child Abuse Guidelines towards an increased emphasis on the importance of inter-agency communication and co-ordination.
In effectively exonerating the professionals involved, the Minister pointed to the fact that "those working in the field of child care have a difficult job to do, resources are scarce, and the special bond between children and their parents is, in itself, a particular inhibition where the question of intervention arises." Such reasoning, and the low-key analysis given to these cases which involved child deaths, demonstrates the limited role that the Irish State traditionally took and expected in child protection, something that has only really begun to change in the 1990s. This is why I believe Alan Shatter is wrong, as he can be seen to be projecting back on to that period a level of accountability and knowledge deriving from 1990s developments that simply did not exist then. If it had done, perhaps he can explain why the Minister for Health himself was so sympathetic to what needed to be learned about child abuse and inter-agency co-ordination and did not insist on holding the agencies involved accountable.
The whole point of attempting to reach a deeper sociological and historical understanding of what effective child protection involves is not in any sense to try to walk away from acceptance of responsibility for mistakes and system failures. It is to deepen our understanding of what real accountability for children has to mean, at all levels. I can agree with Alan Shatter that health boards, and the State more generally, should be accountable for child protection. But I simply cannot agree that at present this should so readily translate into an approach which - to use the term which litters his article - "blames" social workers and other professionals for system failures. He appears to be advancing a model of accountability which wishes to hold front-line professionals responsible for failures within a system that, even by his own account, is known to have been inadequate to the task of achieving effective child protection.
Placing such impossible burdens of responsibility on social workers is neither fair nor in the best interests of child protection. The sooner Alan Shatter and others in positions of influence wake up to this fact the better the prospects will be for achieving a balanced understanding of the inevitable risks of getting it wrong that social workers face in their daily work and reaching a meaningful definition of what accountability means at all levels, from civil society, to government, to front-line professional practice.
Finally, can I stress again that I wholeheartedly welcome the settlement that the McColgan's profoundly courageous stand won them and the profound importance that it is already having for helping other vicitms to be heard and survive child abuse. - Yours, etc.,
FROM (Dr) Harry Ferguson
Department of Applied Social Studies, University College, Cork.