Children in care court reports published

Court proceedings in which children are taken into the care of the HSE are to be published for the first time on a new website.

The president of the district court, Judge Rosemary Horgan, will this morning launch the site of the Child Care Law Reporting Project (CCLRP).

The website contains reports of proceedings heard in district courts around the country over the last three months.

Those reports, which have been written by reporters from the project, reveal the reasons why the HSE seeks orders to take children into interim or long-term care, the responses of the families concerned and the input from the judges hearing the cases. They do not, however, identify the children or their families.

Included among the 30 cases to be published on the website are a case where a baby was reported to have been placed in a wheelie bin by her mother who suffered from mental illness, a case where a 16-year-old girl asked to come into care, and a case where four children returned to their mother, a recovering alcoholic, after a period in care.

The cases also include two where the HSE applications for interim care orders were refused by the judge because the HSE had not made a case justifying the order. The judge offered supervision orders instead.

The website also contains courts service statistics on care orders sought and granted in the different district courts around the country for 2011, the last year for which figures are available. According to the website’s operators, these show a wide variation in the number of applications sought for towns of roughly the same size in different parts of the country.

“The demand for more information on the application of child law is not surprising — indeed it is welcome,” said Judge Horgan, speaking at the website launch in the National Library. “Given the gravity of such cases, a greater degree of information outlining the role, practices, and procedures adopted by the courts in such instances is vital.”

CCLRP director Carol Coulter said she hoped the regular publication of the reports on the website “will help lift the veil of secrecy that has surrounded state care for vulnerable children for too long”.

The project is operating under regulations made by Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald, under the Child Care (Amendment) Act 2007. Those regulations modified the in-camera rule governing cases heard under the Child Care acts.

The website is supported through philanthropic funding from Atlantic Philanthropies and the One Foundation and by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.