Harney must find out why children can be taken without explanation

ON a Friday night a couple of weeks ago, three young boys slept in the same bed in a hostel.

Not because there weren't enough beds, but because they were terrified out of their wits. They had been ripped from a routine that was vitally important to them, a routine without which they can't survive very long because two of them are autistic.

Somebody, no doubt, thought they were doing the right thing. But that night, and other nights that followed, represented an act of unbearable cruelty to those boys and their family.

They were terrified because they had been terrorised. They were terrorised by a syndrome with the harmless-sounding, but deadly, name of "we know best".

Once, many years ago, I was a member of a cabinet sub-committee on Northern Ireland. It was one of those committees where, if asked, you never missed a meeting. And you read your brief well because the language was difficult and complex.

We dealt in subtle shades of meaning, in developing phrases designed to be accepted across a wide divide.

Once a phrase achieved the status of broad acceptability it became what we called a 'term of art', set in stone and never messed with. The sub-committee did other work as well for example, it wrote that government's submission to the first decommissioning body chaired by George Mitchell.

So, being a member of that group, which was chaired by the Taoiseach of the day, John Bruton, kind of meant you knew your stuff, and were able to master a sensitive and complex brief.

However, one day I had to leave a meeting of the group early because I had been asked to participate in a form of assessment that was being conducted into aspects of my daughter's life. My daughter has an intellectual disability.

The assessment consisted of a discussion with a social worker and a psychiatrist, both kindly and well-meaning people as far as I could tell.

But half-way through the discussion it dawned on me... these people were speaking to me slowly and carefully and in words of one syllable. It was clear to them that I was a bit dull, and needed a lot of patience.

That was only one of a number of similar experiences over the years. All of us have had reason to be grateful for the dedication and care of health professionals over the years, and I know many wonderful people in this area.

But there is something in the training of a lot of the professionals in the care areas doctors, nurses, social workers (especially social workers), psychiatrists and psychologists that plants two unspoken thoughts in their brains when they are dealing with the families of people with disabilities.

One, if the child has an intellectual disability, the parent is probably not the full shilling either. And two, the parents of people with intellectual disabilities are probably of a different social order not quite our sort of person.

Now when you point this out to the professionals, they are usually shocked, and full of hot and instant denial.

But go to any group of parents of people with intellectual disabilities, as I have often, and ask them have they ever been patronised or condescended to in their dealings with professionals. Every hand in the room will go up. It starts with "we know best". And it's compounded by the thought that you, the parent, know nothing.

And the result, all too often, is that solutions are proposed for people with intellectual disabilities that aren't solutions for them at all, but really matters of convenience for the service provider.

And all service providers in Ireland in this area operate in an environment where there are no standards, no accountability, no transparency, no internal or external advocacy.

Many of them are substantial business empires dealing in tens of millions of revenue and expenditure, and often hundreds of millions of property assets.

The people they deal with, people with intellectual disability, have no rights of course (we've discussed this before!) and usually no one to speak for them except their families.

And families can be pesky things, often demanding what simply isn't there a higher standard of care, a better-tailored curriculum, one-to-one relationships for their children.

Hundreds of families in Ireland have been subtly intimidated when they raise issues concerning their children "of course, if you're unhappy with the service we provide, you might wish to consider taking your child elsewhere" when everybody knows there is no elsewhere.

Families get used to it. In fact, families learn to be grateful for whatever is on offer.

BUT not all families. Not, it seems, the O'Hara family. You will have read, I imagine, about how Pádraig and Mary O'Hara had their children taken away from them and put into 'care'.

Without notice, without warning, without any indication of what they had done wrong. I don't know them, but I know people who do, and who testify that this is a loving, caring couple who only want what is best for their children.

And who, apparently, have made the fundamental mistake of demanding, in public, what is best for their children.

At the end of a week which must have been hell on earth for the parents, and a week of indescribable fear and torment for vulnerable children, the courts ordered that the family be reunited. But the matter must not be allowed to rest there.

There are children at risk all over Ireland. None of them is at risk from parents who love them and struggle to deal with their problems.

Some, it seems, are at risk from officialdom. No case whatsoever has been made against the O'Hara family. No accusation has been levelled against them. No reason has been given for the fact that their children were taken away.

No redress exists. And anyone who knows anything about autism knows how cruel the separation was. And yet officialdom, it seems, is obliged to say nothing not even to explain how the best interests of the children were served.

What conclusion can parents of people with intellectual disability come to, other than that this was officialdom's way of dealing with demanding parents? It is utterly unacceptable that the system should be allowed to act in this way without a word of explanation.

Children were subjected to terror at the hands of the state, at the hands of a system presided over by Mary Harney. Of course it's not her fault she wouldn't and couldn't have known in advance that something like this could happen.

But she knows now, and she must act.

Specifically, the Tánaiste must ask a respected independent person and it should be someone with the stature of the ombudsman Emily O'Reilly to carry out a detailed investigation into how this happened.

The ombudsman should be asked to report quickly, and her terms of reference must include the requirement to establish if there was an abuse of power in this case, and if so, at whose behest was it carried out.

We need to know if "we know best" turned into bureaucratic abuse in this case. If we don't find out, it will happen again. And again and again and again.