Evidence that child protection services in Dublin are near to collapse emerged at the weekend. The annual conference of the Irish Association of Social Workers in Kilkenny heard that:
The number of children waiting for a social work service in the Eastern Health Board region has soared to 2,400 - more than double the number just two years ago;
One hospital is refusing most requests to admit healthy children who have nowhere to go after three children from one family spent more than two months in a ward;
Babies taken into care at birth are having to stay in maternity hospitals for longer than other babies because social workers cannot find foster parents for them;
At the same time, social workers cannot get around to assessing applications from people wanting to become foster parents.
The conference passed an emergency resolution calling on the Minister of State for Children, Mr Frank Fahey, to address the crisis urgently.
The crisis highlights the need for the appointment of an Ombudsman for Children, the IASW's incoming president, Ms Imelda Keogh, told the conference.
IASW national executive member Ms Bernie Price told the conference social workers in the trade union IMPACT had tracked the number of cases of children to whom no social worker had been allocated in the EHB region which includes Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow. They had established that the number of children affected had risen to 2,400 last February from 1,000 in February 1996.
Ms Norah Gibbons, who works for Barnardos, told the conference the children who had not been seen by social workers could include some whose situations were as serious as those who were already being dealt with by social workers.
A survey at Temple Street Children's Hospital in Dublin had found that 135 children had spent 3,000 days between them in the hospital between June 1995 and June 1997 although they were not sick, Ms Price told the conference. They had been brought to the hospital as a "place of safety" because social workers had nowhere else for them.
Twenty of the children had spent more than 30 days each in the hospital, she said. Six had been hospitalised for over 100 days each .
An indication of how serious the shortage of places has become, she told reporters later, is that nearly half the children in the survey were under two years of age. Very young children are usually the easiest to find foster parents for but social workers had too few foster parents even for these children.
In a more recent survey, between June and November 1997, the hospital found that one group of three siblings had spent 79 days in the hospital and another group of two siblings had spent 43 days there.
The hospital "has been so horrified by this" that it has begun to refuse to accept children under these conditions in all but the most pressing cases.
Ms Rosemary Grant told the conference one Dublin maternity hospital is concerned that babies taken into care at birth are staying on in its neo-natal clinic after other babies have gone home. Parents told their baby needs better care than they themselves can give see the child "sitting in a hospital" because of the shortage of foster parents or residential care.
Ms Price told reporters later the problem was not that people were unwilling to become foster parents. It was that people who declared an interest in fostering had to wait for a long time for the process of assessment to begin.
An Eastern Health Board/IMPACT report last year admitted social workers in many areas were simply too busy to process applications for fostering.