Government under fire over claims of report cover-up

THE Government was accused of covering up the events surrounding the Monageer deaths after parts of a report into the murder-suicide were blacked out.

Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore told the Dáil that “this is a cover-up of some kind”, holding up pages of the report with large sections crossed out.

The report, published on Tuesday, was ordered after the murder-suicide of Adrian Dunne, 29, his wife Ciara, 24, and their children Leanne, 5, and Shania, 3, at their home in Monageer in April 2007.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen insisted there was no censorship involved in excluding certain parts of the report from publication, which was done on the advice from the Attorney General.

“It is important to point out not for the purpose of censoring the report that these redactions took place. I want to make it clear that it is for legal reasons only that the redactions are there,” Mr Cowen said during Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil.

Fine Gael spokesperson on children Alan Shatter said: “The Taoiseach is more concerned with protecting individuals than the welfare of children.”

Mr Gilmore said the legal privilege of the Houses of the Oireachtas should be used to put this information into the public record, as was done in Kelly Fitzgerald report in 1996 into the death of a 15-year-old Mayo girl believed to be neglected at home.

“Whatever the legal reasons may be, four people died in this tragedy, including two young children who were not given a chance of continuing their lives,” Mr Gilmore said.

“We need to know what went wrong here, what went astray. It is not a matter of curiosity; it is a matter of trying to learn lessons from this tragedy in an effort to avoid this type of tragedy occurring again.”

The Government has no plans to come up with the €15 million needed to provide an out-of-hours social work service for children at risk, despite the report identifying the lack of such services as a “fundamental problem”.

Instead, Mr Cowen said there will be a “place of safety” where children at risk can be taken to during weekends and evenings, when the essential services are not available. It is understood the HSE will contract a private company to vet people suitable for taking children into care on an emergency basis, similar to foster parents.

Mr Gilmore said: “A central recommendation that we can see concerns the necessity for an out-of-hours child social work service to be established.

The difficulty is that if a problem arises with a family at risk or having trouble after 5pm or at the weekend, there is no service available. These are the very times the service is most needed – at night and weekends.”