Social services - Obligations come before privileges

THOUGH our economy has been under siege for just a short while it appears that cracks are beginning to appear in the citadel already.

The Health Service Executive has scrapped plans for an out-of-hours service for troubled children because of spending cuts.

The very welcome plans for social care teams, which would have been on call 24/7 rather than the part-time service available outside Dublin, were designed to intervene at moments of great crisis in a young person’s life. The service was to have been a safety net when all else looked as if it might fail. It was meant to keep possibility alive in a life that might be going off the rails, an intervention to help an endangered individual and their community.