Children dying in care - Delaying report akin to cover-up

Details of the report into the death of 18-year-old Tracey Fay while in care were published last month.

They provoked political brouhaha over the whole issue of children dying in care. When the Dáil debated the issue, there was a shocking admission that there had been no report published on the death of any child in the care of the state for five years.

Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Barry Andrews said there had been 23 deaths of children in care between 2000 and 2010. But afterwards he admitted that there “was an issue over the figure”. He was not sure it was accurate. Now we know that there was a minimum of 30 deaths, and there might have been as many as 40 or even 50 deaths.

It is a frightening indictment of the Health Service Executive (HSE) that the death of any child in care had not been independently investigated, but the HSE has not even been able to state how many children died in care in the past 10 years.

Last month, the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) set guidelines for dealing with the deaths of children in care. Those were produced in response to the recommendations of the Ryan Report Implementation Plan, which outlined actions to be taken on a range of issues involving children in the care of the state. The whole thing was prompted by the horrific findings of the recent Ryan Report into clerical child abuse.

The HIQA guidelines stipulated that the HSE should conduct prompt investigations and publish each report within 30 days of completion. Dr Marion Witton, chief inspector of social services at HIQA, explained that the new robust guidelines were needed because delays in publishing reports and the lack of transparency in relation to internal reviews had shaken public confidence in the review process.

The HSE was due to publish two reports yesterday. One was believed to relate to a boy who died of a drug overdose in 2005.

The HSE notified the media yesterday at 11.20am that the two reports would be published at 3pm. But less than a hour before they were to be released, the publication of the reports were delayed for unexplained legal reasons.

People who had seen the reports had been expressing reservations, suggesting that the finds were very inadequate and did not meet the standards published by HIQA about how child deaths should be reviewed. The circumstances of yesterday’s postponement raise further questions and inevitably fuel speculation about some sort of cover up.

Lessons should be learned from each and every case as to what went wrong, the problems that occurred, the weaknesses in the system, and recommendations to ensure the same thing does not happen again.

The HSE should demonstrate that it is learning from past mistakes — not just ignoring them. It needs to demonstrate a real concern, especially in the interests of the children currently in care.