THE life of Kelly Fitzgerald could have been saved if there had been better co ordination between the agencies involved in child protection, the joint Dail Committee on the Family has been told.
The report on the death of the teenager, which has been made public, strongly criticises the role of the Western Health Board. The Fine Gael TD, Mr Alan Shatter, laid it was a "devastating indictment" of its procedures.
I do believe that with better coordination, better system management, proper case conferencing and better communication with individual teachers, then perhaps this child would not have lost her life."
The committee heard that the (report on the death of the 15 year old says that even if procedures had been properly followed, there was no guarantee the child would not have died. However, Mr Shatter said the board's history of dealings with the family "shows a litany of incompetence".
The report, entitled Kelly - A Child is Dead, says the Western Health Board's intervention "was naive and ineffective". It was finally published after Mr Shatter proposed that it be submitted to all Oireachtas members. This means the document now has full privilege and can be published without fear of litigation.
Last night the Fianna Fail spokeswoman on health, Mrs Maire Geoghegan Quinn, said this report was just one in a series on child abuse which had not been published.
The Fitzgerald inquiry, chaired by the director of Barnardos, Mr Owen Keenan, was established by the board to report on "its at tempts to protect Kelly and a sister from danger that their parents posed to them".
The authors conclude that the health board "failed to form an effective assessment of the family or of the degree of risk it represented for some or all of the children".
The Fianna Fail TD, Ms Mary Wallace, told the Committee that Kelly Fitzgerald was known to be a child at risk.
"There was concern about this child from the day she was bomb. In the United Kingdom, she was protected. Her health reports were then forwarded to this country. She survived in the UK until she was 15 but died within five months of arriving here."
In the report it is revealed that Susan and Desmond Fitzgerald appeared to resent feeding their daughter after she came to live with them in Co Mayo in September 1992. They began to deprive her of food and forced her to do heavy work around the farm.
Kelly was beaten by her father regularly with a belt. Five months after her arrival, her father telephoned his brother in London and arranged for Kelly to leave. It appears they knew "she was past the point of no return".
After she arrived in England, her uncle brought Kelly to hospital. She was diagnosed with septicaemia on February 2nd. Two days later she died. Her parents served 18 months in jail for wilful neglect and occasioning actual bodily harm to their daughter.