Children in care - We have not learned from past abuses

If Government promises were enough to resolve our problems, we would probably have no problems, because the current Government has never been short on promises.

The problem is that so many of the promises are as empty and useless as the task force set up to tackle unemployment.

This time last year, following the publication of the Ryan Report which chronicled years of systemic abuse in state-supervised institutions run by religious orders from the 1930s to the 1990s, the Government pledged to distributed €2 million between support groups to provide counselling services for survivors.

No timeframe was given for the distribution of the money, and none has yet been allocated.

The money is coming, they are told, and they were also told that there would be no cut in their funding for this year, but it was cut – by 5.8%. Yet the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and the support group, One in Four, are still being inundated by people seeking professional help as a result of the abuse.

Following the publication of the Ryan Report, the number of people seeking professional support as a result of abuse rocketed. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre had a 40% increase in first-time callers.

While the initial surge of calls following publication of the report was expected, the numbers seeking help one year on have not fallen.

Despite the best efforts of the two organisations to help those in distress, frontline services are struggling to respond, especially in the absence of the promised funding. There is now a waiting list of nine months for victims to receive therapy and one-on-one counselling.

Society essentially abandoned those people as children. They have had to wait for decades for help. It seems that they can now whistle while they wait as far as the Government is concerned.

Various institutions took money from the state to look after and educate children, but we now know that some abused the children and did not even educate them. Instead they dumped them on the streets to fend for themselves when they came of age. Discarded and homeless, many developed mental health issues and turned to alcoholism.

The survivors are now in need of help, but the Government is essentially ignoring their plight. It seems to be preoccupied with the greedy speculators and bankers who got the country into the current mess.

About 800 children leave state care every year, with no aftercare or any statutory right for such assistance.

They are being dumped on the streets to fend for themselves, like what happened to the children in the Ryan Report.

A recent Focus Ireland study on young people leaving care in Ireland found that within two years, 68% of those young people experienced homelessness. This is an indictment not only of the Health Service Executive and the Government, but also of society in general for tolerating such gross ineptitude. It seems that none of us have learned from the appalling mistakes of the past.