10,992 entries for Inspections - State

Over the following decade, a series of events changed the public perception of child abuse irrevocably, both in terms of increasing awareness and higher expectations of a range of professionals in the child protection network. What became known as the Kilkenny Incest case66, the ‘X’ case67, the Kelly Fitzgerald68, the West of Ireland Farmer69 case, and the Fr Brendan Smith70 case had broadened the public view of the nature and prevalence of child sexual abuse, but concern had also grown about emotional abuse and neglect. In addition, the Madonna House Inquiry71 and the television documentary ‘Dear Daughter’72 had combined to inform the public about dimensions of institutional abuse.73 One long-standing member of the Irish Association of Care Workers described the mood at the time amongst care workers a follows: In my 17 years experience of direct work in child care, I never witnessed such disappointment and despair among my colleagues. Since the Madonna House child sexual abuse scandal broke 20 months ago, there have been a stream of further allegations and suggestions of allegations against care staff, in various care centres around the country. This has led to fear, upset and anxiety among conscientious professional child care workers.74

There were also the beginnings of concern about the potentially intrusive character of child protection work and a growing awareness that early intervention of a more supportive and less forensic nature would provide a more effective means of assisting vulnerable families, thus lessening the potential for future harm.75

During the same decade, the aforementioned Child Care Act 1991 had been implemented, and the services operated by the health boards in respect of children had been restructured. In addition, the Irish Catholic Bishops also produced a framework for responding to child sexual abuse by priests and religious in 1996.76 The question of introducing mandatory reporting had been raised and dropped, and the responsibility for the management of child abuse was re-assigned from the medical directors of community care (whose posts were abolished) to the newly created posts of child care manager in each community care area.77 Additional posts of ‘community child care worker’ and ‘family support worker’ had been added to community care teams. It was in this context that Children First: National Guidelines for the Protection & Welfare of Children were developed by a multi-disciplinary working group appointed by the Junior Minister with responsibility for Health and Children and published by the Department of Health and Children in 1999. A protocol had been published by the Department of Health in 1995 outlining the steps to be taken by An Garda Síochána and the health board when notifying each other of suspected child sexual abuse and this was incorporated into Children First, along with broader definitions of child abuse which was now classified into four types: neglect, emotional abuse (including the witnessing of domestic violence), physical abuse and sexual abuse, each of which was explicitly defined within a broad context. Children First included a section on family support, which was recommended for early intervention into cases where harm to a child had not reached the ‘abuse’ threshold.

The guidance offered in the document went beyond identification and investigation to overall case management which included assessment, planning, intervention and review. Unlike previous guidelines, Children First was underpinned by a set of principles which included participation by parents/carers and children in conferences and the development of child protection plans. The ‘list’ mentioned in earlier guidelines was restructured into the Child Protection Notification System which was to be managed by a multi-disciplinary group of professionals.

Recognition was given to groups of particularly vulnerable children including those in out of home care, those with disabilities and those who were homeless. Acknowledgement of the potential for abuse by persons in the caring professions was indicated by a section on the steps to take if allegations were made against employees or volunteers within a service. Children First stated that it was intended to provide ‘overarching’ guidance, but that local areas and organisations providing services to children and families would be expected to produce policies and guidelines tailored to their own context. The provision of child protection training to a broad range of disciplines was identified as compulsory, and all health board staff were declared eligible to receive reports of concerns about children. Children First also recommends the establishment of local and regional child protection committees who would hold a monitoring role in relation to the operation of the guidelines.

While Children First was officially ‘launched’ in October 1999, its implementation status has remained unclear up to the present time. ‘Implementation officers’ were appointed in each health board area. A National Implementation Group (later renamed the National Implementation Advisory Group, was formed and in addition, the Health Board Executive Agency set up a Children First Resource Team which issued guidance on assessment and the operation of the Child Protection Notification System. Both these groups were disbanded in 2003, despite the fact that the guidelines had not been fully implemented on a national basis. Training officers and advice and information officers were appointed, the latter post carrying responsibility for liaising with and providing Children First training for community and voluntary organisations. The Social Services Inspectorate published a report in 2003 which reviewed the implementation process, and while it was generally positive about the advancement that had been made, it noted that progress in relation to Garda/health board cooperation, the child protection committees and planning for family support services was inadequate. Problems of staff retention were identified, as well as a lingering tendency for individual health boards to use their own discretion about how to implement the guidelines.

The publication of Children First was quickly followed by a succession of tailored guidance documents produced by the Irish Sports Council, the Department of Education and Science and the Catholic Church, to name a few. Guidance for the voluntary and community sector was also produced and all of the former were designed to comply with the overarching principles and practices of Children First. Reported concerns about children increased exponentially from 243 in 1978 to 21,040 in 2006, with the highest number of reports in the ‘neglect’ category, followed by the child sexual abuse category. Reflecting the ever-widening pool of concerns about children, the HSE now reclassified concerns of a less serious nature as ‘welfare’ reports which, in 2006, accounted for over half of the reports made to the system. While the definition of ‘welfare’ is not specified in guidance, it is assumed that these reports were considered to constitute situations that warranted a non-investigative family support response. The HSE Review of Adequacy of Child and Family Services 2006 identified factors linked to ‘welfare’ including emotional/behavioural problems in children, substance abuse, involvement in crime, disability, mental illness, domestic violence and parental inability to cope.

When the Government launched Children First in 1999, it made a commitment to review and evaluate the effectiveness of the guidelines within a reasonable time frame. No such review had occurred up to the publication of the Ferns Inquiry78 in 2005, but in his response to the report, the then Minister for Children, Mr Brian Lenihan TD, undertook to conduct a review of national compliance with the guidelines. To this end, advertisements were placed in the national newspapers inviting interested parties to comment on Children First, meetings were held with key stakeholders and Secretary Generals of government departments and a study was commissioned to explore the views of service users. Responses to the consultation process indicated that while there were difficulties and variations in practice around the country, there was general satisfaction with the contents of Children First and that most of the obstacles to their implementation were concerned with local operations and infrastructures rather than the guidelines per se. Recommendations from the review suggested that revised guidelines should spell out more clearly the roles of different government departments in protecting children and promoting their welfare and require each public body to produce relevant policies and procedures. Measures to reduce re-offending were also proposed, including Garda vetting. The review noted current difficulties for members of the public and professionals in accessing the system in order to report concerns and suggested measures to alleviate this situation. Methods to quality assure practices in the different areas, early intervention and the establishment of local and regional structures to support the child protection services were also suggested.79 The service users’ study focused more generally on the child protection system but questioned the usefulness of the use of the ‘inconclusive’ category as an outcome of investigation given the difficulties that it caused. It also recommended the adoption of a differential response to reported concerns about children.80 The Ombudsman for Children also raised concern about the implementation of Children First in November 2008 following a number of complaints to her office, and she announced an investigation into HSE child protection practices in that regard.

The issues highlighted above, the age of criminal responsibility, the inspection of children’s homes, the shift from residential care to family based services, repealing the Children Act 1908 and the unification and co-ordination of childcare services were all core recommendations of the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Systems in 1970. They were of course, not the only issues that concerned the Committee, as the discussion on child protection guidelines above testifies, but they provide an indication of the slow pace of progress in achieving the recommendations. It is evident that broad agreement on many of the issues highlighted in the aforementioned Report was achieved in the decade between 1965 and 1975, and it was in the implementation of change that blockages were encountered. Prior to the publication, and indeed establishment, of the Committee to Enquire into the Reformatory and Industrial Schools System, in addition to the well-known Tuairim Report, a number of other significant reports and commentary were circulated that, in part, anticipated and addressed concerns that were to be highlighted in the report of the Committee. Therefore, in understanding the context in which the Reformatory and Industrial School Systems report was compiled and the basis for their recommendations, a brief overview of these reports and commentaries are presented. Before doing so, however, the paper provides an overview of the data on children in care from the 1960s to present, to place the policy debates in context.

In this section of the paper, a broad overview of the number of children in substitute care is firstly provided, before exploring in more detail the numbers of children in different forms of residential care.81 From the foundation of the Irish State, the numbers of children in alternative care, particularly residential care, were relatively high with upwards of 12,000 children in care in the 1950s.82 During the mid-1950s, the numbers in alternative care dropped rapidly and by the end of the 1960s there were just over 1,200 children boarded-out or at nurse and approximately 3,000 in various forms of residential care. The numbers began to rise again from the early 1970s. From the late 1980s, the numbers in substitute care began to rise again, with just over 5,000 children in substitute care, but what is notable is that the majority of children are now in foster care rather than residential care, as was the case until the early 1980s.83 As shown in figure 184, the trend towards the decline in the number of children in care (defined as children in various forms of foster care and residential care) continued throughout the early to mid-1970s, but increased somewhat in the late 1970s.85 A decline was evident again in the early 1980s, but the number of children in care has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s, with currently over 5,000 children in Statecare. Figure 1: Children in care, 1970-2006 Figure 2: Children in care, 1970-2006 per 1,000 children under 18

Figure 2 shows this trend per 1,000 children under 18, highlighting that the increase in children in care was not driven by broader demographic trends alone. The rate per 1,000 children increased from two to over four children in care per 1,000 children under 18 from the late 1980s to 2006.86 Figure 3 provides a time series on the number of children in residential care in units under the operational and legislative ambit of the Department of Health and Children/Health Service Executive and the Department of Education and Science. It shows a very dramatic decline in numbers from approximately 2,200 children in 1970 to just over 400 in 2006.87 As noted above, while the overall number of children in care grew from the mid-1980s onwards, the type of care placement shifted decisively from residential care to foster care. By 1980, as shown in figure 4, there were slightly more children in foster care than residential care; in contrast, currently 84 percent of all children in care are in foster care (including relative care).88 Figure 3: Residential care in Ireland, 1970-2006

To put it another way, while the overall numbers of children in care have increased, the role of residential care has moved from a position of dominance in the provision of alternative childcare in Ireland to now being a residualised and specialised service.89 Figure 4: Children in residential care as a percentage of all children in residential and foster care, 1970-2006

As shown in figure 5, and outlined in greater detail later in the paper, the terminology for what were reformatory and industrial schools changed over the period in question and figure 6 plots both the closure and opening of schools over that same period. Although for administrative purposes, the terms reformatory and industrial schools were abandoned, it was not until 1st March 2007 that the relevant sections of the Children Act 2001 were enacted, formally abolishing the term Reformatory and Industrial School. Figure 6 highlights the closure of more than 20 schools between 1960 and 1970. Figure 5: Changes in titles of care institutions, 1960-2005 Figure 6: Industrial Schools and Residential Homes, 1960-83

Figures 7 through 10 below represent available data on children in Industrial Schools and Residential Homes on 30th June of each year from 1970 to 1983. Responsibility for the majority of the homes listed above transferred to the Department of Health at the beginning of 1984, an issue that is dealt with at greater length later, thus the end date of 1983 for his data. Overall there has been a slight decrease in the number of children in such institutions, with girls representing a smaller proportion of their population each year as shown in figure 7 below. Figure 7: Children in care in Industrial Schools and Residential Homes by gender, stock figures 1970-83

As shown in figure 8, there has been a substantial decline in the number of children committed through the courts to Industrial Schools and Residential Homes from over 1,000 in 1970 to less than 200 in 1983; this seems to explain most of the decrease in the number of children entering this type of care. The Health Acts remained a key mechanism for committing a considerable number of children. Figure 8: Children in Industrial Schools and Residential Home by legal basis, stock figures 1970-83