Putting children last

THE Children's Bill 1996 which is to become law this year will fail. Just as the 1908 and 1941 Children's Acts and the 1991 ChildCare Act failed too. Adding adjuncts and amendments to these Acts in the intervening years was nothing short of a sick parody because successive governments collectively and consistently let children "in crisis" down.

This Bill fails to provide the support at an early stage for parents with troubled children and, in this way, prevent problem children becoming the criminals of the future. To achieve this, a Parents' Responsibilities Act should have been in place before the first Children's Act comes into being.

In the past many children were taken away from unmarried mothers because church and State said children needed "a loving family unit". But many children were taken away from family units too, or simply for truancy. Others were placed in orphanages or industrial schools as they were then known because a mother or father died.

For many of these new widows or widowers their grief was brief as they embarked on new relationships. Second families soon arrived and very often the children born of them had no idea that previous siblings existed.

And successive governments never asked why. Instead they passed or amended more Acts and watched in silence as more and more innocent babies and children were hunted down, rounded up and hidden in religious and non religious institutions.

We all know now what happened in many of these institutions. Successive governments knew then. The unmarried mother who did plead desperately to hold onto her baby often found herself condemned from the pulpit, shunned by her community and ultimately rejected by her family.

Everybody forgot to ask the mother who was the daddy. Not infrequently she herself didn't know how she had conceived.

Failure to live up to the responsibilities of fatherhood is not confined to the socially deprived. My own experience and that of a number of former orphanage inmates is testimony to that.

I know that as an unmarried father, mine had no rights. Just as some conscientious married and unmarried fathers have no rights today. However I was doubly disappointed about his non involvement in my upbringing because, as a psychiatrist, he should have, known the importance of keeping contact and fulfilling his parental responsibilities.

When I travelled to Africa to meet him 34 years later I asked him: "Dad did you dump any more children in Ireland? Almost inaudibly he replied: "I don't know." And I still don't know.

This trail of abuse to children still exists in Ireland today; irresponsible, reckless behaviour - shattering children's lives. Putting children last.

Instead of orphanages we now, have child care, residential and day centres, special care units and juvenile detention centres. We have psychiatric units for children. We have drug addicts aged 10 and younger. We have a population of young people who will never have to worry about a mortgage because they'll spend more years in prison than out of it.

I could go on with a litany of injustice done to these children. But my question is this: why haven't successive governments addressed the problem of parental responsibility and proper parenting in a wide ranging way before now? Parental fines and the like as envisaged by the new Bill are little more than lip service to the whole question of parental responsibility.

In 1996 the Governor of the State of Alabama decided to address the problem of errant fathers/partners. In nine months $50 million was collected. Some from those on benefits. It would be a miracle if the Government here adopted that policy for all men who have not acknowledged their children and refuse to pay maintenance. As the Governor of Alabama said: "Why should children suffer? No child asked to be born."

My mother lived within 20 minutes of the orphanage where I was placed as a child. I never knew it. Nobody seemed to know it. After a two year courtship she took the baby boat to England in 1946 to hide, to wait and to give birth to her dark secret. She forgot to tell my father that she was separated from her husband. She forgot to tell him that she already had children, one of them in an institution. Two weeks after my birth we returned to Ireland. My father refused to support her. The following day she placed me with, an adoption agency, vehemently refusing to sign the adoption papers and nobody asked her why.

Guilt ridden, my father tracked me down six months later in a baby home. For six years he was the pivot of my life until one Saturday he never came back.

My mother told me, 10 years after our reunion, that her mother had once told her that she never liked her. After the screening on RTE of the Dear Daughter documentary about the Goldenbridge orphanage and the deluge of calls to my home that followed it I listened to thousands of men and women who suffered just as my mother suffered.

Many former inmates, now parents themselves, don't understand why their children shouldn't suffer as they did. They believe that the way they were reared should be the way they should rear their children.

As Paul Bailey, a member of the Irish Association of Child Care Workers, said at the association's annual conference in Killarney earlier this month: "If parents had the skills to look after their children in the first place, their children wouldn't need to be in care." Today's child care workers' are not the child care workers of the past. Still, even though the Tanaiste Dick Spring told the delegates, "the depth of knowledge and the breadth of ideas that exists among child care professionals must be taken into account by policy makers", this does not appear to be happening.

Community care workers are often inadequately resourced with little or no support to cope with this scale of social injustice. As Noel Howard, president of the association said: "A child removed from home and family, however bad that home and family, needs compassion and warmth, and perhaps the childcare worker will give that child the only compassion and warmth he or she has ever experienced."

Taxpayers should know that as much as £40 million is being invested through this Bill. But are they getting value for money? I think not.