Charities: More at-risk children will die

CHILDREN’S charity Barnardos has expressed its “shock and dismay” at the revelation that 188 children, known to child protection services, had died over the past 10 years.

Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay said that “as a nation, we should be appalled by the waste of young life”. “The Minister for Health and Children must take control of this situation immediately. Everybody knows that the system is stretched to breaking point, is drastically under resourced and suffers from appalling structures and a lack of adequate political priority. If the most senior members of Government fail to address these glaring deficiencies, more and more tragedies will result,” Mr Finlay said.

Children Rights Alliance chief executive Jillian van Turnhout went so far as to ask Taoiseach Brian Cowen to avail of a little-known power, under the 1993 Statistics Act, to instruct the CSO to “access and scrutinise” the HSE child death records. “This must be done to restore public confidence in the state’s child protection system. The alliance calls on the Taoiseach, as a matter of urgency, to use this power to make an order requiring the CSO to collect statistics within the HSE to verify the number of child deaths. The drip-feeding of figures adopted by the HSE over the past weeks has exposed its inadequate recording and monitoring system. It has beggared belief,” she said.

Fine Gael spokesman on children Deputy Alan Shatter said he believed there were further questions for the HSE about at-risk children, who had been referred to social services but who, due to a lack of staff, were on waiting lists for a full social worker assessment.

“For example, we know from published figures that in 2008, out of 24,000 reports of children at risk, 8,000 were not assessed or investigated,” he said. “What the HSE is still scandalously concealing is the number of children who died and in whose cases, there was a failure to take any action to assess their circumstances,” he said.

Last night, Minister for Children Barry Andrews issued a statement calling on people to bear in mind the “sense of loss” felt by families who lost children in such circumstances.

“I now look forward to a report to be written by the Independent Review Group, which will provide the definitive account of how the state interacted with these children and the extent to which they were cared for or failed by the state. The information has been passed to the Independent Review Group, which I appointed. The review group has been asked to prepare a summary report based on anonymised data that will provide recommendations about how child protection services can be strengthened.

“It is not the intention that the review group would investigate the role of families in the provision of care,” Mr Andrews said.