Childcare neglect - Issue never gets priority it needs

THIRTY years after Ireland’s non-existent childcare service was initially discussed by Cabinet ministers, major neglect of the system continues to this day.

State papers released after the expiry of the 30-year embargo show that official treatment of the issue was glib and dismissive of the findings of the task force on childcare services. To describe the report as overdue would be a gross understatement since the task force was appointed six years earlier.

Criticisms of the state’s failure to provide really effective childcare services have long been aired in these columns. Despite the appointment of a Minister for Children three decades ago, and despite the trenchant recommendations of the task force at the time, the issue never got the priority treatment it warranted.

Today the scandal at the heart of the childcare system is the lack of an after-hours service for out-of-home teenagers. According to leading children’s solicitor Gareth Noble, children presenting to Garda stations are still being given hostel-style emergency accommodation overnight.

But next morning, there is nowhere for them to go and no therapeutic interventions. He describes the system as “rotten from top to bottom”. On the street, kids inevitably encounter drug users and end up in a “cycle of drugs and crime”.

It is no exaggeration to charge successive governments with a disturbing lack of compassion towards this grave problem. To their shame, most politicians saw no votes in children’s issues. Perhaps that explains why the state turned a blind eye to the shocking abuse of children in institutional care.

In 1979, a example of callous disregard for children’s rights was illustrated by the suggestion that the issue ought to be given more attention because some important tourists were to arrive in Ireland that year.

The findings of the task force and other reports are as relevant today as they were then. The language is the same. The inadequacy of psychological services and the lack of special services for children in need of care, control and educational support were as clear then as they are now.

A full range of services was urged for Dublin, Cork, and Limerick, including residential and day care units. Shamefully, troubled teenagers are still being consigned to adult psychiatric facilities.

It is unbelievable, as Fergus Finlay of Barnardos succinctly put it, that a vulnerable child who needs to access social services after 5pm could end up in an adult psychiatric unit because of a lack of out-of-hours services.

Obviously, since 1980, some measures have been put in place. But successive governments, particularly a chain of Fianna Fáil administrations who held the lion’s share of power, stand accused of doing the minimum they felt they could get away with.

It is absolutely outrageous that after 30 years, those dedicated people at the coalface of Ireland’s childcare crisis are still crying out for basic resources and meaningful government action.