FAILED BY SOCIETY

THE text message from Adrian Dunne’s mobile phone the morning he wiped out his family was almost tender in its simplicity.

“Ciara and Aidran are so very sorry,” it said, its misspellings uncorrected before the ‘send’ button was pressed. “We nott going to Livepol,” it continued, referring to the couple’s almost certainly fanciful notions of starting a new life in Liverpool. “Instad we pick heaven. Please for give.”

But it was a perverse tenderness that characterised the scene when gardaí forced their way into the Dunne family home and found two little girls, Leanne, a fortnight shy of her fifth birthday, and Shania, just three and a half, lying toe-to-toe on the sofa, covered by a duvet and holding their favourite Dora the Explorer dollies, the way they were arranged after their father suffocated them.

The body of their mother, Ciara, 26, was on the floor nearby, a ligature fastened around her neck. Their father, Adrian, 29, had hanged himself in the hall.

In the circumstances, the plea for forgiveness was hard to accept. The two little sisters were helpless innocents and Ciara was a devoted mother with learning difficulties, completely under the control of her domineering husband.

But Adrian too had his problems and in the two years since the Dunne family were found dead at their Monageer, Co Wexford home, the finger of blame has pointed less at the often paranoid and hostile young father who’d been blind since his teens, and more towards the health and social services.

The official report of the Monageer Inquiry confirms the suspected failings.

Despite the wide array of health professionals and support services the family engaged with, the erratic nature of that engagement was not noticed, the concerns of individuals were not highlighted and the information gathered by all was not shared.

Communication was “disjointed”, the inquiry team found.

No one was responsible for coordinating the myriad services the partially sighted children required and no one had access to all the information held on file.

If all the pieces had been fitted together, someone might have seen the worrying overall picture of a vulnerable family with unmanageable debts, controlled by a father grieving for his own father, who died a year earlier, and his brother, recently lost to suicide, and burdened by an unjustifiably bleak view of his daughters’ prospects.

More crucially, there might have been someone in authority to react when, on Friday, April 20, the day before their deaths, Ciara and Adrian visited an undertakers and planned their funerals, down to the clothes the little girls would wear, the white coffins they would all be laid to rest in and the music that would be played in the church.

The undertaker knew something was very wrong but the gardaí were slow to respond and, as it was the weekend, the social services they contacted put off intervening until the following Monday.

That single failing – the lack of an out-of-hours social work service – forms the first and key recommendation of the inquiry team’s report but the Government has already rejected it, saying the €15 million it would cost each year is not feasible in the current economic climate. “This would not be the best use of funding,” Minister for Children Barry Andrews said.

The Dunne family, child protection charities, gardaí and many health professionals disagree. Adrian Dunne’s text message never arrived at its intended destination, for reasons unknown to the technicians who examined his phone.

It isn’t the only message arising from the tragedy that has failed to hit home.