Much of our child-care system is close to breaking point because of inadequate resources and planning. And, whatever its merits, manadatory reporting of child abuse is no magic bullet for the crisis. There can be no progress in improving our national services for children at risk without much more money and much better planning.
Children relying on the care and protection of the State need help when they need it. And they need the right kind of help, whether help at home or placement in care.
Yet there is strong evidence that our under-resourced system is so overwhelmed that some children are not getting the help they need, the kind of help they would certainly receive in almost any other Western society. The crisis is such that the State frequently finds itself with no proper placements to offer individual children who are urgently in need of care.
Between June 1995 and May 1997, 135 children in need of care but who were not sick spent an aggregate of more than 3,000 days living in hospital wards - because the State could offer nothing else. In 1995, 1,636 referrals were made to the Eastern Health Board's "out-of-hours service" which is aimed at serving young people who present themselves at night as homeless or in need of care.
In a fifth of these cases, the best the board could offer was to refer the child to a bed and breakfast. In 55 cases, the child actually had to spend the night in a garda station because of no alternative.
It seems that nationally, at least 15 children at any one time are placed outside the jurisdiction in the North, Britain and the US. For the first time, a youngster who had not committed an offence was recently placed in St Patrick's Detention Centre because the State had nothing else to offer.
Health board staff are frequently forced to leave children in home situations which they know to be highly unsatisfactory because they have no alternative to offer the child. Systems abroad do not have to resort to placing children in hospitals, in bed and breakfasts, in centres abroad, in prison, or in unsafe conditions at home in order to cope.
A further sign of crisis is the £1.5 million the State has spent in the High Court defending its failure to ensure care it is legally obliged to provide to individual vulnerable children. The Minister for State for Children, Frank Fahey, admitted recently to the Dail that on appointment he found the State was defending the indefensible in High Court cases involving 63 vulnerable children. Independent consultants retained to advise on the future of child-care services in the Eastern Health Board reported "a crisis in staff morale", "a crisis in the availability of placements for children", and a service which is "crisis driven" at all levels. In fairness to the Eastern Health Board, its staff are working extremely hard, struggling to cope with very complex problems which are growing in volume daily.
Like all the health boards, it has new legal duties heaped on it regularly. Quite apart from existing problems, it also has new waves of social problems and challenges, from drugs to AIDS and asylum seekers.
The EHB has to pick up the tab for failures in urban and social planning in our capital. It is also at the front line in dealing with the social consequences of mass long-term unemployment, of male domestic violence, of alcohol abuse, and so on. In many senses, the health boards are caught in the middle between soaring need and inadequate resources and national planning.
The Government has also acknowledged the scale of the problem. In justifying to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child why its new legislation will only raise our age of criminal responsibility from seven to 10, the Government relied essentially on the crisis in the child-care system. It claimed an important factor in not raising the age beyond 10 "was the serious doubts about the ability of the child-care agencies to cope with the additional burdens placed on them by having to cater for greater numbers of seven, eight and nine-year-old children".
Why do we have this crisis?
There has been a serious lack of urgency at a policy level which is reflected in the desultory pace of legal reform. It took 23 years to get the Child Care Act from first planning stage to full implementation. Planning for the new juvenile justice legislation to replace the British 1908 Children Act began 25 years ago - and it is not yet on the statute book, not to mention funded or implemented.
Most other Western European states renew their child-care legislation every 10 to 15 years. Childcare services are blighted by inertia in terms of strategic policy and reform. The lack of a national child-care strategy was starkly evident by the State's own admission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recently. The committee asked whether the State "has adopted or is planning to adopt a comprehensive national strategy for children". The Irish reply was as instructive as it was startling: "To date our concentration has been on dealing with individual issues. Eventually it would be our intention to draw a wide range of individual developments together in the context of a national strategy."
It seems that the kind of strategic thinking now essential in the humblest business or other enterprise has not penetrated our national approach to vulnerable children.
The absence of a clear strategy makes us more vulnerable to ad hoc policy lurches, shifts and reversals. Policy veers wildly, with announcements or promises often not followed through. Mandatory reporting of child abuse is a plank of government policy, later it is abandoned, and then it stages a comeback as an element of the government's programme.
A Social Services Inspectorate is promised in a flurry of activity last year; it then seems to die a death only to be resurrected in evidence to the UN Committee in Geneva. Even in the official evidence given at the hearing in Geneva, Minister Liz O'Donnell managed to row back on what she had promised between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.
Information deficit
In this information age, every enterprise worth its salt judges its progress and performance on the basis of information about that performance. The Irish State steps in to take children off the hands of their parents, yet since 1993 it has been unable to give a national head-count of how many children are in State care.
This may seem like a minor matter but it is actually a telling comment on the lack of strategic command of the system. How can a system which cannot even give basic information about what it is doing inspire confidence? We can't say today: how many children are in State care; why; for how long, and from what home circumstances.
Past evidence suggests that more children remain in care longer here than elsewhere, because of inadequate support services in their homes and communities. Another strategic problem in the system, besides lack of proper planning information, is a lack of proper focus on prevention.
Lack of Focus on Prevention
Only 19 per cent of the EHB's child-care spending is devoted to what might be termed preventive spending. In fairness, some of this prevention work is excellent but it is far too thinly spread. The remaining 81 per cent is spent largely on "fire brigade" and curative measures in terms of children at risk - that is, on responding to the problem only after it has occurred.
The 81 per cent of the budget the EHB spends on crisis and cure measures makes little impact on reducing the number of crises in children's and families' lives. Such referrals have been soaring nationally and look set to continue in this vein.
The proportion spent on prevention is being squeezed not only by soaring referrals. It is also likely to be shrunk further in the EHB region as the board prepares to spend astronomical sums on the building and running of 48 places, in euphemistically titled "high support units". These are, in effect, secure units in which to detain children whose behaviour is so difficult that they cannot be contained in open settings.
The problem, of course, is that the more of these places you open the more you fill. International experience suggests that running them is like pouring money down a drain, both in terms of soaring costs and ineffectual outcomes. Secure units cannot solve the problems of incarcerated youngsters or the underlying problems which lead children through the open-care system to a secure unit. It seems remarkable that more money and planning look set to be invested in these secure units than in more prevention or a strategic approach to the development of critically scarce places in foster care or in open, residential care.
Inadequate resources
Despite the substantial additional money which has been pumped into the system in the past few years, a great deal more is needed. The Minister for State admitted to the Dail last month that £100 million would be needed over the next three years to salvage the child-care system and put it on a proper footing.
Those of us working in, or close to, the child-care services look askance at tax cuts for well-to-do taxpayers while State agencies don't have enough money to provide the basic fabric of services to deprived children in a civilised society. It is very hard to square £20 million for a stand in Croke Park and substantial tax cuts for the relatively well off with a system on its knees for lack of investment in planning and people.
The proponents of tax cuts spoke of "payback time". It is indeed "payback time" - not to comfortable taxpayers but to neglected children, who, for seven decades of independent rule have had hopelessly inadequate investment in services for them.
It is not that the problem is insoluble; there are many signs of hope including:
The £30 million restored recently to youth and drug services in deprived areas
The establishment of a National Children's Trust which may provide a conduit for long overdue philanthropic support of childcare services by business and private individuals
The UN Committee Report on Ireland which, while justifiably very critical of Government provision for children, provides a blueprint for action by the government
The imminent report of the Commission on the Family which should also give clear pointers on how the State and its partners can better support parents and children in conditions of social stress.
The answer lies in prioritising support services to children at risk in their own home, with sufficient back-up to ensure suitable placements in care for those for whom care at home doesn't work.
The task of building a better future for vulnerable children requires more money, much better planning, and a partnership between government and key interests. Most of all, it requires an acknowledgement that the blighted state of our child-care system is a stain on all who hold power in our State. Building a better future for marginalised children is not just the business of health boards - crucial though their role is. It is the shared business of the Cabinet and of many other sectors and systems as well.
Other sectors include the local authorities, the churches, trade unions, the media, the voluntary sector and the wealth holders. All of those stakeholders in our society would do well to heed the warning of Dr Michael Smurfit, who last year spoke of the need to tackle the problems of poverty in our society. The crisis of services for our vulnerable children is one of the major problems of poverty in Ireland. Solving it requires spending and will. It is "pay-back time" for our vulnerable children. The Celtic Tiger means we have the money: do our leaders have the will?
Robbie Gilligan is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Academic Co-director of the Children's Centre in Trinity College Dublin.