Grace case: A settlement but justice was lacking

It has been a long time coming but at last the woman we’ve come to know as Grace has a secure future.

With a €6.3m settlement approved by the High Court, she will have all the comforts and supports that money can buy.

But what will that really mean to a woman who, the court has heard, was taken 20 years too late from an abusive foster home, holding on for dear life to a toy to which, to this day, she still clings?

They say the first two years of a child’s life are critical in determining how well they will cope with the rest of it. Fail to nurture, to support, and to love a child in that crucial first phase and the impact can be lifelong.

Grace had love — but it was from a mother who feared she could not adequately care for a child with profound learning disabilities and who trusted the professionals to find her that care instead. And when she needed nurturing and support to compensate for the distance from her mother’s love, she got instability, exclusion, and abuse instead. Not just for two years, but for 30.

In approving the settlement, Judge Peter Kelly remarked that, for reasons unknown, a recommendation that Grace be removed from the last home where she was placed after seven years there was reversed and she languished there another 13 years.

Unknown or not, he speculated that the reason was that health officials did not want the bother of having to explain to a court why they needed to vary her care order to remove her from the home.

Judge Kelly is probably right. It would have cost them time and trouble to explain their concerns about the home, to defend their vetting of that home in the first place, to find a new home for Grace, to face her mother, and tell her what had been going on.

So they transferred that cost to Grace, who lost 20 years of her life as a result. And they transferred it to her mother, who lives with the anguish of her daughter’s suffering.

They transferred it to two brave social workers who risked their careers to speak out on her behalf. And they transferred it to the taxpayer, who now foots the bill for a commission of inquiry and for the court settlement.

Judge Kelly described the case as “not just shocking, but a scandal”. This from a man who, for years, dealt with troubled teens who became known as Kelly’s Kids, who, day after day, grappled with cases of runaways and tearaways, children from chaotic backgrounds or tragic backgrounds or good backgrounds that somehow proved insufficient to save out of control youngsters from themselves.

It takes a lot for Judge Kelly to declare that something is a scandal. It will take a lot for the effects of this scandal to work their way out of Grace’s life.

€6.3m is a start, but a caring heart, a listening ear, and a brave soul back when Grace was a child would have been spared a lot of cost, and not just in money terms.