As the year ends, are we beginning at last to get to grips with the deficiencies in our child care services? The announcement of plans to appoint an Ombudsman for children, and of other related measures, suggest that we may. The office of Ombudsman for children will, if sufficiently strong and independent, provide individuals and organisations with a way of highlighting faults and of getting individual cases looked into and attended to, in a system which is not always as responsive to individuals as it should be.
Perhaps of more importance will be the appointment of an official in each health board area to ensure, as far as is possible, that the various elements of the child protection system work together effectively and smoothly. These include social workers, doctors, gardai, public health nurses, child care workers, family doctors, hospitals and many others.
Also vital in providing a better deal for children will be the Social Services Inspectorate which will have the task of maintaining standards throughout the system and of investigating breaches of these standards. The commitment to providing support services for victims of past abuse in all health board areas is very welcome. Many adults carry a heavy burden of pain through their lives because of what was done to them as children at a time when children had no voice and when, indeed, they may not even have had the words to convey what was being done to them.
The postponement of the introduction of mandatory reporting a legal obligation on various professionals to report suspicions for at least three years is also welcome. Improving the child protection system we have is likely to protect more children than flooding an over stretched system with reports of suspicions. A caveat must be entered here and it is that Barnardos, an independent child care agency which has won widespread respect for its years of quality work with children and families, is in favour of mandatory reporting and its views cannot be dismissed lightly. The merit of the announcement by the Minister of State, Mr Austin Currie, is that the matter will come up for review again in three years and Barnardos will have that period of time to try to convince its peers of the value of mandatory reporting.
Hopefully the Minister can now turn his attention to tackling the question of contact between adopted and fostered people and their birth parents an issue surrounded by an enormous amount of pain on all sides. Hopefully, too, he might rectify a defect in the Child Care Act namely that the regulations and safeguards introduced for children in residential homes specifically exclude people with mental handicaps who live in residential care, an exclusion hard to understand given what we now know about what can happen to those who are vulnerable.
All in all, though, the outlook for child care services is brighter at the end of 1996 than it has been for a long time. That progress was bought at the price of children's pain and that is why it is of very great importance.