Childcare system is a total shambles and Harney should get the sack

SURELY the child protection crisis is as important as any the health service has ever faced in the past?

Surely it demands the immediate attention of the most senior members of Government?

A fresh start, total reorganisation, and the acceptance of real responsibility and power?

Within government, the person with ultimate responsibility for child protection is the Minister for Health and Children (yes, “Children” is part of the title that goes with her well-paid job). And yet she has been silent and invisible while scandal after scandal has unfolded in recent weeks. If the forthcoming reshuffle is to have any moral value, it must see the back of a minister who seems to have abdicated all sense of overall responsibility for one of the state’s most fundamental duties, the protection of its children.

Everyone in Ireland who is involved with children believes that taking a child into care must be a last resort. The right place for a child to be is at the heart of a family. A family can be any place where a child finds love, care and protection, where a child is helped to grow and shown the sort of authority that a loving and effective parent can bring.

There are thousands of lone parent families in Ireland — the majority of them poor — where children are growing up surrounded by love and with every prospect of making it in life.

A parent can love a child and still find it impossible to translate that love into effective parenting. Poverty, domestic violence, drugs, alcohol, loneliness, depression, debt, homelessness — these are all things that can beset individuals and get in the way of effective parenting.

Many parents, faced with a combination of these issues, look for help — and help can be found in a variety of ways. It’s often called family support and it is offered throughout the country by state agencies and voluntary organisations. The primary purpose of family support is to help families that have come off the rails to get their lives, and their priorities, back in order.

But sometimes people don’t know they need help, or they’re afraid, or ashamed to ask. Sometimes relationships within families break down altogether and risks begin to emerge. Sometimes, as those risks become clear, intervention is necessary. That intervention can often take the form of placing a child, or sometimes the children, of a family in care. There are in excess of 5,000 children in care in Ireland now.

The whole process of intervention can go wrong in three ways. First, intervention can happen too soon, or in a disproportionate way — it can happen that children are removed from the family when other methods of family support and help would lead to better outcomes for the children.

Secondly, intervention can happen too late. The risks weren’t spotted in time and, as a result, terrible damage can be done. Children have died in Ireland because the system failed to discover what was happening until it was too late.

And third, the system can go terribly wrong because even after a child is placed in care, the management of his or her welfare is chaotic and poor.

In a well-resourced and well-managed system, any of these things can still happen because people are not perfect — but they are a lot less likely to happen. In a badly resourced and badly managed system, they are inevitable.

When 20 children die in care, we know something is going terribly wrong. When, over a number of years, we have to conduct investigation after investigation into mishaps and tragedies, we know it is pretty fundamental. When secrecy becomes the default response to anything going wrong, we have reason to be deeply worried. And when the system itself is forced to admit things have gone out of control, we know we are in the middle of a major scandal.

And that’s where we are right now. The death of children in the care of the state is terrible, unforgivable in many ways. But a much more revealing discovery was made just this weekend. The state, in some guise, has been allowing people to foster children without knowing anything about the background of the fosterers. In fact, the state has been making a lower rate of payment to foster parents who aren’t appropriately vetted — almost as if it were some kind of money-saving device.

This is a flagrant breach of the state’s own policy and practice. If this kind of thing can be countenanced at any level of management it proves, beyond any further doubt, that the system is so chaotic it can only be described as broken beyond repair. This kind of practice cannot happen as a result of human error or complexity of the situation. A decision to ignore something so fundamental and obvious as vetting has to involve proactive decision-making. That’s the really frightening thing.

Barry Andrews will no doubt be attacked over this. Phil Garland, the HSE’s assistant national director with responsibility for children, will be told to go and defend it — and may well end up in the firing line too. But Barry Andrews has no power in this area and Phil Garland has no budget. All the real power lies elsewhere in the system. The two men charged with change, and made to be accountable (and both of them, by the way, committed to making Ireland the best place it can be for children), have no way of forcing anything to happen.

There are a number of senior people in the HSE with overall responsibility in particular areas — Phil Garland, where children are concerned, and Martin Rogan, in relation to mental health, are two examples. They’re good men. But the structure of the HSE is such they have no budget, no line management responsibility, no power.

AND there are people in government who are called junior ministers but who have real power and responsibility. There’s a junior minister who controls the overseas aid budget, a junior minister in charge of the Office of Public Works. Again, that’s just two examples.

But the junior minister for children has no responsibility whatever for the budget in this area. He can’t direct the HSE to do anything, he can’t order money to be spent in any better way, he can’t hold anyone to account.

Good people have been rendered powerless by terrible structures. The HSE has become a monster that spends one-third of its budget on running 50-plus hospitals and two-thirds on a vast range of essential social services.

Recently, the HSE board considered a presentation on the issue of vulnerable children. I’m reliably informed it was the first time in the history of the HSE that children were on the board agenda. That’s how bad it is.

And we will never get it right until politicians who have the power are forced to account for their failure and politicians who have responsibility are given power to go with it. We will never get it right until the HSE is fundamentally restructured so that authority and responsibility go hand in hand. Until we at least tame the monster we have created, children will continue to suffer.