Wrong priorities: Child protection concerns

AS indications of social failure, or at best a cause for great social concern, go, the figures released by Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, in its review of 2013 are startling and challenging — challenging in an economic sense and startling in a moral sense.

The report shows that referrals to social services because of child protection and welfare concerns almost doubled to 41,600 in just seven years. Nearly half of these (19,407) focused on child protection concerns dealing with suspicions around physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or neglect. The figure for 2013 was more than twice the 2006 figure of 9,461.

As a pre-election budget approaches, we’re all counting our chickens before they are laid, much less hatched, and these figures, and others like them, should give us all pause for thought. In a society that was not so very long ago shown the horrible consequences of light-touch regulation on care for vulnerable children, surely all talk of tax breaks and pay restoration must wait until we are certain that this pressing social issue, and some others, have been resolved?