THE state is paying private residential childcare companies in the region of €14,000 a week to look after individual children, while beds remain empty in homes run by the Health Service Executive (HSE).

THE HSE’s standards watchdog this week published four comprehensive reports on special care units where troubled teenagers are detained in order to provide them with therapeutic interventions.

IF you are not part of the solution, then maybe you are part of the problem.

HSE special care units are failing more than half of the troubled children who have been placed there, according to a report which raises serious questions about the HSE’s capacity to help vulnerable young people in care.

THE chairman of Limerick’s joint policing committee yesterday called for a high-security youth facility, from which three inmates escaped at the weekend, to be closed.

ALL the inmates at the most costly secure unit in the State were at large for a time over the weekend following two separate break-outs.

Gardaí and the Health Service Executive have launched separate investigations into an incident at a centre for troubled young people in Limerick where an employee was threatened by knife point by a patient.

THE cash-strapped Health Service Executive is spending more than €4,800 weekly to operate a special care unit for two disturbed boys in Limerick, it emerged yesterday.

ANY lingering doubts about the underlying causes of juvenile delinquency are well and truly removed by a new report showing that four out of five young people in detention schools suffer from psychiatric problems.

The State is spending almost €30 million a year on specialised care for 72 disturbed young people. The main issue in relation to this should not be the cost, but whether proper treatment is being provided.

THE Health Service Executives said last night it hopes to be in a position by the end of April to open a residential centre in Limerick for disturbed youths-nearly seven years after it was completed.

THE Health Service Executive Mid-West was unable to say yesterday if a €5 million centre for disturbed youths, lying idle for nearly seven years, will open next month as planned.

THE elderly Limerick teacher who accidentally locked herself into a school for four nights over a bank holiday weekend has still not returned to work, more than a month after the incident.

THE €5 million centre built in Limerick four years ago to accommodate disturbed youths is still a huge financial burden on the Health Service Executive (HSE) Mid West, even though it remains shut.

A €4.2 million secure unit for juvenile delinquents which has been lying idle since April was the subject of top-level talks yesterday to review its future.