THE Western Health Board last night issued a strong rebuttal of the report on the death of the Co Mayo teenager, Kelly Fitzgerald, which was highly critical of the health board's role.
It says the independent report, which the board commissioned, was inaccurate and unfair to the board in many respects and it disputes many of its findings.
The board's response, issued after its community care standing committee met in Galway yesterday, is set out in a 32 page document. It states that, while Kelly Fitzgerald had been physically abused, she had died from meningococcal septicaemia and natural causes which were not connected to the abuse.
The board had received no indication of the difficulties she was in while staying with her parents on their Mayo farm prior to her death in London in February 1993.
"The report quotes parents in referring to beatings and food deprivation. None of this was known to the board. It refers to neighbours reporting that Kelly was given heavy work to do. No such reports were made to the board. At no stage, from the time of Kelly's return to her family, were there any reports, from any source - neighbours, school or otherwise - to the health board of any concern relating to Kelly."
Media comment and interpretations put upon the report had been "even more unfair and often quite wrongly based", the board's document claims. The impression given had reduced significantly "the confidence of the public in the capacity of the board to respond to problems of child abuse".
The chairman of the inquiry team, Mr Owen Keenan, director of Barnardos, the child care organisation, said last night that he had no comment to make on the board's disagreement with much of the report and the contention that it "unfairly represented the position of the board and its staff".
The WHB document states: "The board's disagreement has been with the analysis by the inquiry team and conclusions reached in relation to the performance of duties by the board, not with the recommendations."
It expressed disappointment that the inquiry team had chosen to "analyse the actions of the board in terms of the possibility that the board, by acting otherwise, might have prevented Kelly's death".
Although the inquiry team had eventually decided that it was not possible to conclude that a more effective response would necessarily have prevented Kelly Fitzgerald's death, in raising the issue of prevention it had "failed to address the substantial and extensive areas of prevention which needed to be considered at all levels of society if the notion of prevention was to be given real meaning".
These areas included preparation for parenthood and support for parents.
The board, nevertheless, did not wish to minimise the importance of monitoring and protection arrangements, backed up by effective legal provisions.
The WHB response was not intended to be defensive in relation to what are seen as unwarranted and damaging slurs on the board, but is substantially intended as a contribution to the wider debate which is necessary if the legacy of Kelly's death is to be a turning point in society's thinking about child abuse rather than a regression to futile scapegoating".