Oberstown Children Detention Campus has been “running on fumes for years” and any attempt to expand its capacity without addressing staffing levels would undermine safety at the facility, striking care workers have said.
Staff from the facility engaged in a third work stoppage on Tuesday, with members of the Fórsa trade union protesting at the Department of Children, which oversees the centre.
The union acknowledges there have been some improvements, including hiring additional staff, since a spate of assaults last summer drew national attention to safety on the campus.
But it also says key issues remain unresolved and proposals to increase a capacity that stands at about 50 before safe staffing levels are implemented would potentially affect workers at the facility and the teenagers they care for there.
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Staff believe the pressure to accommodate more young people is likely to grow in light of recent high-profile incidents of criminality involving people too young to be sent to prison.
One social care worker from the campus said staff are dealing with “young people who often present with challenging and difficult behaviour; they’re only in Oberstown as a last resort and we regularly find ourselves in difficult, sometimes dangerous situations ... If we don’t have enough staff to operate the unit safely, properly and adequately, the young people we work with on a daily basis are suffering too.”
In a statement issued on Monday evening, management said significant progress had been made on staffing over the past 12 months and described the ongoing industrial action as “regrettable” when talks were still in process.
Speaking outside the department, however, Fórsa assistant general secretary Deirdre O’Connell said the process had proven incapable of delivering solutions as long as the department wasn’t represented in the room.
“I think management and our members basically want the same thing, the level of staffing required to ensure everyone at Oberstown is safe and we have made progress on certain areas, there has been more money and some new staff at a newly created grade recruited, but there is clearly more to be done and the management need the department to support them in that so it should be part of the process,” she said.
Asked about an assertion by management that the industrial action was premature because the two sides had agreed to work together on an independent review of staffing which is due to start this month, O’Connell said the union had not been given any start date and had received no assurances that any recommendations made would be implemented.
“But another sticking point is the fact that Oberstown can’t even agree with us on how many hours a week our members are supposed to be working. So there are historical issues that still need to be addressed before we can move forward.”
Although management says recruitment has improved and suggests retention is not the issue it is portrayed to be by the union – two-thirds of staff, it says, have more than five years’ service – O’Connell said that particular grades remain a big problem because of demands placed on staff.
“They [management] wrote to the Minister themselves when this whole issue of the increase of bed capacity came up, basically telling the department they had no problem in increasing the bed capacity, but not until they actually had the staff to do so. So they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth on this particular issue.”
