Children’s rights – Boy must be given proper care — now

Despite a virtual assurance last week that a place would be found for the brain-damaged 17-year-old boy who has been held at Cloverhill Prison, he was sent back to the prison for a further week yesterday.

Precious time has been lost in which this boy might have been helped. This includes wasting court time and prison time on what is really a health problem. The boy has been before the High Court 32 times in recent years.

The South Western Area Health Board now suggests that it has found a place for the boy but needs more time to access the suitability of that place. In fact, the centre involved rang RTÉ last week, after the case was reported, to say that it could take the boy.

The caller expressed surprise that the health board had not approached the centre, as it is partially funded by the health board and already has young people from the health board in its care.

Until last week health board authorities had been contending that they were unable to find a suitable place for the boy to receive therapeutic rehabilitation in this country, and were therefore looking for a place for him in Britain.

The boy’s mother is dead and his father is living on the streets with an alcohol problem. Having suffered a chronic brain injury in a car accident in 2000, the boy has been under constant suicide watch after repeated attempts to kill himself, as a result of anxiety over being jailed.

The health board states that he should not be held in prison. Yet, through bureaucratic bungling, it had not bothered to enquire whether the required facilities were available here before the court was misinformed.

There are four suitable facilities in this country, including one in the boy’s hometown. It was the

Probation and Welfare Service that brought the availability of facilities to the attention of the health board, the court was told.

This is another blistering indictment of the health service. Nobody from the health board bothered to appear before the court yesterday.

Instead they sent a barrister to inform the court that it does not have the authority to compel anybody from the board to appear, but they sent their legal representative out of courtesy to the court.

We are supposed to be living in a representative democracy, but such conduct is representative of the worst arrogance in our society.

The health board authorities are trying to blame others for interfering with the boy’s rights by highlighting facts in the case. These people have ignored that boy’s rights, and they have the colossal impudence to blame others for highlighting their reprehensible failings.

The behaviour of these public servants suggests that they think they are answerable to nobody, certainly not the public that they are supposedly serving.

They would seem to be taking their lead from the arrogance of a government that has deliberately misled the people that it purportedly represents.