We have failed our children before. We cannot afford to do it again

YOU may have seen the recent news coverage about the Government’s decision to create a new future for Shannon Airport.

They have decided to separate Shannon Airport from the Dublin Airport Authority and bring it together with Shannon Development to form a new entity with a commercial mandate in public ownership — and in the interests, they say, of the future development of the Shannon area.

Shannon Airport, of course, has a problem. It has very considerable debts, around €100m. At the moment, those debts are part of the balance sheet of the Dublin Airport Authority, but it’s clear that if they are transferred to the new entity, there is every possibility that this new beginning for the Shannon region could be strangled at birth.

However, in press comments accompanying the announcement, Minster Varadkar went on to make it clear that these “legacy debts” will not be transferred to the new entity. While the joint Shannon Development/Shannon Airport company will be expected to stand on its own two feet in the future, it will start life with a clean balance sheet.

I’m sure there are all sorts of arguments about whether it’s wiser to run all our airports as one company, which has been the way in recent years, or whether it makes more sense to give an airport like Shannon a particular regional focus. There can be surely no argument though that if you’re going to ask Shannon Airport to build a different future, it would make no sense whatever to saddle it with a huge debt even before it starts.

I want to make absolutely certain that the Government applies that sensible precedent to another organisation which will shortly start a new life — the new National Child and Family Support Agency. It is in all our interests — and very definitely in the interests of the children of Ireland — that that agency is not strangled at birth by an overhang of debt. Unless we are all very vigilant, there is every possibility that it will be.

You many not have heard yet about this new agency. So let me tell you something about it. First though, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you why it’s so important.

Later this week a critically important report will be published. It’s a report into the deaths of children who were either already in the care of the State because they were at risk, or who were known to the State to be at risk. I haven’t seen the report yet, but I know the people who wrote it — Geoffrey Shannon, Ireland’s leading expert in children’s law, and Norah Gibbon, who is a colleague of mine in Barnardos and one of Ireland’s leading authorities in child protection.

It’s a report into the deaths of nearly 200 children. You may remember that for a long time the HSE, and the then Minister for Health Mary Harney, denied that anything like this number of children and young people died. The truth, when it emerged, was devastating, and forced the then Government to establish the enquiry whose report is about to be published.

Already some leaks have appeared, and if they are accurate it is clear that this report, like so many others, will make difficult reading. Sensitive information on children written on the back of envelopes. Death certificates not available in some cases. More than half of the children involved died of unnatural causes, and were clearly intensely vulnerable. Among those who were most vulnerable were young people who were deprived of any form of child protection or support because they had just reached the age of eighteen. They were in some cases suicidal, or self-harming, or dependent on drugs. In all cases they were left alone.

Acres of newsprint, and hours of radio and television, will be devoted to this report when it is published. How did it happen? When are we ever going to learn? How many more reports are necessary? These are only some of the questions you can expect to be asked in the coming days.

The answer to many of them may be the same. It may be a mundane, even banal answer. But it’s an essential part of the truth.

When they created the HSE, as a huge monolithic organisation employing more than 130,000 people, they created a recipe for disaster. We all know that the HSE has been crisis-driven since the very beginning — accident and emergency crises, cancer crises, hospital crises. In the middle of the impossible list of jobs the HSE was given to do — in fact at the bottom of that list — it was also given legal responsibility for the protection of children.

But it was never given adequate resources, adequate lines of authority, adequate management. The crisis affecting children was invisible, while the other crises were demanding the attention of senior executives, senior specialists, politicians and the media. Two hundred children had to die before they realised the system couldn’t protect them.

Many of the people working in the system, social workers and others, have known for a long time that the system was rooted in failure. Many have spoken out, some have walked away in despair. But the reaction of the system as a whole was to downplay the crisis.

The new Government, and the new minister for children, have taken a different view. Better legislation about child protection is being enacted, and a referendum on the rights of children is to happen in the autumn. Behind the scenes, a huge amount of work has been done to create a new agency which will take over the functions of the HSE in relation to child protection, and which will promote much better practice in areas like family support, better diagnosis of problems, and early intervention.

That new agency is critical. It will be headed up by its own management team, under the leadership of a chief executive, Gordon Jeyes, hugely experienced in child protection in the UK. And it will be underpinned by law, mandated to prioritise the protection of children at last.

There will be no new money for this task, however. The budget and the staffing of the new agency will come from the resources of the HSE.

And therein lies the next potential crisis. I understand that there has been a long-running battle, involving several government departments, the HSE, and the new agency itself, over how much the HSE will part with in order to enable a fresh start to be made. If that battle is not won, the new agency will start with a huge millstone of debt around its neck. And it will only be a matter of time before it too is doomed to fail.

We cannot afford that. We have let our children down too often in the past. The new children’s agency must get a fair starting budget, and it must be done in a completely open and transparent way. If we fail in this, then once again we have failed to learn the lessons from the tragedies that have destroyed some of our children. We cannot — we must not — fail them again.