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.