An empty promise on child protection

There might be other European countries with a record like ours of failure to protect vulnerable children, a record that demands they be alert to any threat of paedophilia.

However, there cannot be too many where that obligation is so sharp.

Likewise, there cannot be too many European countries whose history demands — screams, really — that it build robust, active agencies to offer oversight of child protection, so the horrors of our past might not be repeated.

Against that background, our report today, that the State’s national body set up to develop services for child victims of sexual abuse has not met since October, 2016 — 18 months ago — provokes shame and outrage.

Whether that report provokes any meaningful response is, tragically, an open question.

It is also an all-too-predictable failure in public administration, which not only deepens that shame and anger, but also encourages toxic levels of cynicism.

Incredibly, and in what can only be described as a betrayal, the National Steering Committee for Sexual Abuse Services has met only three times since it was established in May 2015, though it is mandated to meet every three months.

That this exposure of indifference, ineptitude, or hypocrisy — take your pick — comes so soon after last month’s publication of a highly-critical Garda Inspectorate report, pointing to the ongoing failure to establish regional centres to provide all necessary services — medical, policing, or therapeutic — for sexually abused children, suggests many things, all of them unattractive and all of them unacceptable.

How can this be? Is the work of that body complete? Has it run into a stone wall? Has it been resourced properly? Are those responsible for managing this project competent?

Why has Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, not either demanded that the steering committee deliver the service it was established to deliver or publicly stated that the resources to establish and sustain it are not forthcoming?

Failing that, are we, and especially all of those whose lives have been blighted by the sexual abuse they suffered as children, to conclude that this promise was just another example of patronising lip-service designed to defer, deflect, and silence? Just as the body set up to deal with the national flood threat was?

Responding to questions submitted on foot of the Garda Inspectorate report last month, Tusla, the child protection agency leading the group, said: “Even though there appear to be commitments at very high levels in the Garda Síochana and Tusla to develop child centres, there are still no centres of any type or model in operation and there has been very little progress in the last five years.”

Again, how can this be? Are our promises to protect children utterly valueless?

That this failure to help abused and vulnerable children comes to light just as the polarisation around the Eighth Amendment reaches a new intensity says something deeply challenging about this society’s real attitude to children.

The Catholic Church lost great influence because it did not protect children entrusted to it. That same charge can now be levelled at our State, a charge that shames us all.