Missing persons helpline – Government must restore vital funding

IT is more than 20 months since the Department of Justice withdrew funding from Ireland’s national missing persons helpline, run by Victim Support, but there has been no sign of a replacement service.

Instead the Department adopted the usual bureaucratic temporising tactic of setting up a committee, or in this case, the Commission for the Support of Victims of Crime, which has invited organisations to submit requests for funding of various projects.

The figures for the last full year for which statistics are available indicate that 5,997 people were reported missing in 2005.

Some 61% of those were children, many running away from home. Some simply came home but others committed suicide and some were abducted or even murdered.

All but 75 of the missing cases were resolved by the end of the year, but that figure should not be allowed to obscure the reality of the number that were not found.

It amounted to almost three people disappearing without trace every fortnight, which should be an alarming figure. Many of those who went missing were not adolescents off on some kind of frolic, but confused or ill people who got lost.

With people living longer and mental health facilities being closed down, the figures for such missing people are likely to increase in coming years.

Those who go missing are usually vulnerable, and it leads to a lot of worry and heartache in many families. For every person who goes missing, an average of thirteen people are deeply affected, which means that as many as 78,000 are affected annually.

It is therefore an outrage that this problem is essentially being ignored. Distraught families have to turn to the Garda Siochána for help.

The force has enough to do in preserving order and battling crime without also being saddled with the added responsibility of functioning as a missing persons bureau.

Gardaí are not trained for the task, and it is both dangerous and absurd to try to lumber them with this extra responsibility.

Fifty full-time staff run a national helpline for missing people in Britain, with the help of 80 volunteers, but in this country there are none.

We don’t have to ape the British, but we should open our eyes and face up to the problem. Missing in Ireland Support Service (MISS) has requested funding on three different occasions to establish another national helpline.

The third applications last August, was for €200,000, but the organisation has not even had a reply since then. This is not only bad manners; it is bad management and an insult to the concept of public service.