IF ONLY WE CAN LEARN FROM THIS

The loss of Sharon Grace and her girls broke hearts and bred anger, writes Caroline O’Doherty

ROSIE REDDY sees her two granddaughters in children playing on the street and hears their voices in the excited squeals and giggles that escape from neighbourhood gardens.

Her home is at the back of the house where three-year-old Abby and four-year-old Mikahla lived with their mum and it’s an ever-present reminder of the joy they brought to her life.

“I have images of the two little ones there. If they got into bother with their mammy, they’d say ‘come on we’ll go to Nana’ and over they’d come. They were two divils.”

Abby, Mikahla and their mother, Sharon, died five years ago today when a depressed and distressed Sharon walked them into the sea a short distance from their Wexford town home and all three drowned.

It was a tragedy that broke hearts and bred anger in equal measure. It was a Saturday evening and 28-year-old Sharon Grace had gone looking for help, asking at the headquarters of the local social work team at Ely Hospital, primarily a geriatric facility, if she could see a social worker, only to be told she had to come back Monday morning.

She was finding it hard enough to get through the day. A weekend must have seemed an eternity. In the end, she felt she couldn’t wait and brought the girls to the deep waters off Kaats Strand.

The “if onlys” were quick to follow. If only Sharon had revealed the extent of the despair she was feeling, if only the fishermen who frequented Kaats Strand had passed by that night and stopped her, but mainly, if only there had been an out-of-hours service to answer her cry for help.

The tragedy shone a spotlight on the lack of emergency out-of-hours social work services, not just in Wexford but across the rest of the country too with the exception of Dublin.

The problem had been raised before – mainly by children’s rights campaigners concerned that young runaways and children taken into care had sometimes to be kept in garda stations, hospitals or bed and breakfasts at weekends until social workers came back on duty to find them a proper place where they could be cared for.

But the loss of Sharon Grace and her little girls elevated the problem to that of national scandal. The fact that social workers were only available from 9-5, Monday-Friday, never seemed so daft nor so inadequate.

In the aftermath of the drownings, a working group was set up to examine the arguments for a 24-hour social work service and concluded in 2007 that it should be put in place.

The Health Service Executive accepted the recommendation and began talks with the Department of Health and Children and the relevant unions about how such a service could be provided, how much manpower it would require and, most crucially, how much it would cost.

Talks continued throughout 2007 and early 2008 without progress but by then there had unbelievably been a second multiple tragedy in Co Wexford.

In April 2007 29-year-old Adrian Dunne from Monageer made arrangements for the funerals of himself, his wife Ciara and their two little girls, Shania, 5, and Leanne, 3, and soon afterwards all four were found dead at their home.

The funeral director, stunned by Dunne’s strange requests, had raised the alarm but once again it was a weekend and once again there were no social workers on duty with the necessary powers and skills to intervene.

Another chorus of “if onlys” followed. For Barry Grace, Sharon’s estranged husband and father of Abby and Mikahla, the sentiments were painfully familiar. He had relived the night his wife and girls died over and over, wondering how things might have been different if help had been available when Sharon went looking for it.

“There should be somebody on-call at all times,” he said this week.

“Nobody knows if there was somebody on call that night whether it would have changed everything but there is always that doubt in your mind. There shouldn’t be that doubt left.”

Barry and other local people, moved either by the Kaats Strand and Monageer tragedies, or their own personal loss, began campaigning for round the clock social work services for the county.

Initially their 24/7 Suicide Action Group created a stir, earned headlines and caught political attention. They were invited up to Leinster House, met senior politicians and received assurances that their message was being heard and would be acted upon. Nothing happened.

Then early last year the report of the inquiry into the deaths of the Dunne family in Monageer was published, its number one recommendation – like the working group set up after Kaats Strand – being that a 24-hour social work service should be set up.

It was too late. The Department of Health and Children had already ruled out the idea months before, saying the €15 million it would cost to provide the extra staffing each year was not feasible in the current economic climate.

“This would not be the best use of funding,” Minister for Children Barry Andrews said at the time.

Eileen Kehoe from the Co Wexford village of Oulart was one of the founding members of 24/7, spurred into action by the loss of her 27-year-old son, Darren, to suicide shortly before the Monageer tragedy.

Darren had been depressed for a while and as Eileen’s anxiety for him grew, so too did her frustration with the level of services available to help. One Sunday night, five weeks before Darren died, he got a rope with the intention of killing himself. Eileen realised to her dismay that her only option was to call the gardaí and try to have him committed to St Senan’s, the county’s psychiatric hospital. To her relief, the crisis passed. St Senan’s, a forbidding and, rightly or wrongly, feared Victorian premises on top of a hill outside Enniscorthy, was described by the Mental Health Commission earlier this year as “unfit for purpose” and it is expected to have to cease taking emergency cases next year.

Eileen feared taking Darren there involuntarily while in a suicidal state would have made him worse.

“It was really hard to get him to go there even when our GP eventually persuaded him that he needed to. He worked for himself and I remember when we left after an appointment, he said quick, get me out of here before anybody sees me or nobody will employ me.

“There is a stigma attached to the place. What we wanted in 24/7 was, as well as out of hours social workers, for there to be an out-of-hours psychiatrist available somewhere a young person like Darren would actually go.

“We thought there could be a psychiatrist attached to Caredoc [the county’s out of hours GP service] but we also wanted a psychiatric unit in Wexford General Hospital. If you go to a general hospital in the middle of the night, nobody knows whether you’re there for a bad leg or a mental illness. You have some chance of privacy.

“I also felt that the doctors needed to see Darren at his worst – not the morning after when things had calmed down. People don’t have these episodes 9-5, Monday to Friday. The nights and weekends are probably nearly the worst time because people are maybe out drinking or coming home late and alone and everything feels harder.”

Eventually the 24/7 campaign fizzled out.

“I didn’t have the heart to do it any more. I got into it in the beginning because it was something positive to do after Darren died but it got frustrating. There’s very little has changed.”

“Nothing has changed,” says Rosie Reddy. “If another one (suicide) happens – and they do keep happening – it’s just a case of so and so did that and that’s the end of it. Nothing comes of it.”

Rosie believes the lack of official action adds to people’s reticence to talk about suicide which could compound the problem by reducing public pressure for official action.

“There is a lot of people that, if their offspring did it (died by suicide), they don’t admit it. I actually think the worst word in the dictionary is ‘suicide’.

“I do find I meet new people and when they ask me how many children I have, I can’t say two. I can’t deny Sharon. But then if I say I had three and I lost one, they ask how did you lose them and once you mention the word suicide, you can see their reaction changes.

“They don’t know what to say. I think it would be different if she had been killed in a car crash. That would be easier for other people to hear. They’d know how to react. But to me she is still gone. I’ve still lost my child.

“I don’t say the word very often but that’s what happened to her. I can’t not talk about her and I can’t not talk about what happened.”

Fortunately, there are enough people in the county willing to talk openly about suicide so that one positive development has come about since the deaths of Sharon, Abby and Mikahla. Just last week, the first clients were seen by a new advice and counselling centre opened in Wexford town by voluntary organisation, Console.

Console was founded in 2002 by Kildare based businessman Paul Kelly following the death through suicide of his younger sister. It was set up primarily to provide a 24-hour telephone helpline and therapeutic support for those bereaved by suicide but now also, in conjunction with the Turning the Tide group, it runs a separate 24-hour helpline, the 1Life service, for the suicidal.

It had two offices – in Dublin and Galway – until Kelly became convinced of the need for a third one in Wexford. At a candlelight vigil in the town centre for those lost to suicide last year, he told the gathering of his plans.

The centre is less than campaigners had wanted from the HSE but more than they could have hoped for given that it is entirely a voluntary effort. Its specialist psychologists have started seeing those who have lost loved ones to suicide but by autumn this year, Kelly plans to have therapists in place specifically to help the suicidal. Lack of funding, however, means they will most likely be restricted to office hours.

“It’s a massive undertaking,” he admits. “We have huge overheads because our staff have to be highly qualified. We are dealing with life and death situations.”

Console doesn’t charge for its services and must raise 95% of its funds through charitable donations. The small HSE contribution it was receiving was cut by 12.5% last year and by 6.5% this year.

The Wexford centre, however, is being entirely funded from voluntarily contributions, the bulk of which have come from the community.

Local woman, Orla Roche, chairwoman of Friends of Console, is one of the initiative’s most enthusiastic supporters and effective fundraisers. Her brother, Paul, was 33 when he died by suicide four years ago this June and she had frequently despaired of the services available to him as he battled depression.

“With my brother, whenever he needed to see a counsellor he had to make an appointment and find €100 a time. There were always deterrents to getting help. What the Console centre will offer is a service that suits the people who need it. “I think that’s the most important thing – being there when you’re needed, whatever way you’re needed.

“Darren went out for a walk in the middle of the night the night he died. It’s the same for a lot of suicidal people. They can’t sleep and they can’t find anywhere open. If there had been somewhere he could have gone, just somewhere to get a cup of tea and have a chat – about the weather if that’s all he was able for.”

“Not a café where he had to look to see if he had a fiver in his pocket first but somewhere he could just have walked through the door – somewhere with no deterrents. I want the centre to be 24-hour. We all do. It’s very frustrating that it can’t be the state doesn’t provide that kind of service but we have to walk before we can run. A year ago we didn’t have a centre so it’s a step towards what we want.”

Orla helped organise a Valentine’s Ball in February that raised €10,000 – a phenomenal sum for one event in a medium-sized town that has had its fair share of economic woes.

“It shows the level of support. People want to help. They say I want to do it for my uncle, for my brother, for my friend’s brother – so many people have been touched by suicide.”

Darren Kehoe’s death showed clearly the ripple effects of a suicide. He was one of eleven siblings all left grieving.

“Fifth from the top,” says his mother, Eileen. “He had a lot of people to love him and cry for him.”

Eileen has done a lot of crying and knows she isn’t finished yet.

“As time goes on, it doesn’t hit you quite as often but when it hits you, it hits you just as hard as ever. You could go three or four weeks and you’re fine and then I have a day when I fall apart. It will always be like that.”

Rosie Reddy too knows there are difficult times ahead although to her and her husband, Eddie, every day is an anniversary of the day they lost a huge part of their family.

“We’re always at the grave. It’s only over the road. Even coming back from town with the shopping, I pop in so I could be there two or three times a week. The date doesn’t make a difference to the way we feel. Every day hurts the same.”