Logan: Young are invisible to the civil service

CHILDREN are “largely invisible” to a civil service which is “excessively bureaucratic” and “disconnected” from people’s lives.

The stark comments are contained in the Ombudsman for Children’s annual report for 2010.

Ombudsman Emily Logan said administrators did not appreciate the “harm” their decisions can cause children and how quickly that damage can be inflicted.

Ms Logan said that, despite the “lip service” paid to listening to children, those in positions of power failed to respect the right of children to be heard.

She said in the six years the Ombudsman for Children has been in operation:

* Complaints have jumped from 374 in 2005 to 1,223 in 2010.

* Funding had fallen from €2.46 million in 2008 to €2m in 2011.

“While some progress has been made in the past six years, the fact remains that many children and young people in Ireland continue to face barriers and challenges in the realisation of their rights and in accessing a range of basic services,” said Ms Logan.

She said 36% of complaints concerned education and 37% concerned health, and said an analysis of their casework provided “supporting evidence” for the need for public sector reform.

“It is a dominant feature of our investigations that, with few exceptions, they highlight a lack of awareness about the impact of civil and public administration decision-making on the lives and rights of children and their families,” she said.

“In this respect, the individual children appeared to be largely invisible in the decision-making process. The result of this has, on occasion, been an excessively bureaucratic approach to public decision-making, and often a disconnect between administrative decision-makers and those affected by their decisions.

“A particular aspect of this is the absence of an appreciation of how quickly harm can be done to children — by depriving them of education, separating them from their parents, providing for their care, etc.”

Ms Logan said she was very concerned at the failure to implement laws and policies regarding children. She said the failure to respect and protect these laws and policies was “at the root” of many of the difficulties faced by children today.

“Perhaps the most critical omission across the whole civil and public service when it comes to children and young people is the failure to respect their right to be heard and have their views taken into account when decisions are being made that affect them.”

Launching the 2010 report, Austin Currie, the country’s first children’s minister, described its contents as “sobering” and noted “how little had actually changed” since his term in the mid-90s.

* www.oco.ie or free-phone [phone].