How can it be that, after nearly two decades of intense public concern about child homelessness, services for these children are in the mess revealed by this newspaper yesterday and today? In June, 30 per cent of children seeking emergency accommodation had to be turned away by Eastern Health Board (EHB) social workers who had nowhere to send them. The best they could hope for was to be allowed to sleep in a garda station overnight. Of those given accommodation, some were sent to a hospital.
To add to the picture of a service in crisis, it now appears that children referred to daytime social workers in their own localities for attention are sometimes sent back to the garda stations that night because this is the only chance they have of getting a bed. Homeless children in Dublin must compete for the handful of beds that is available in the middle of unprecedented economic growth.
How can this have occurred? Nobody can say they did not know it was likely. Father Peter McVerry has been campaigning on the issue for so long that a generation of children has grown into adulthood in the meantime. Focus Point too, has been campaigning for many years as have others. Focus Ireland, a policy body which grew out of Focus Point, has called for four urgent remedies.
First is a 24 hour service for children in the EHB region. Second is a trebling of the number of emergency beds to 24. Third is a settlement service for young people who have experienced homelessness and fourth is more day-time facilities for young people who are out of home.
For many years the seriousness of the problem has been denied by the EHB and there is indifference at national level. It is in this indifference that the real problem lies because funds flow from government and without such funds and support all agencies are handicapped.
But there are some signs of change. The current regime at the EHB is seen by many people in the field as willing to contemplate change and to get involved with people seeking to bring it about. There is now an opportunity to redress the situation. But to do so, the board will have to listen to those social workers who meet children nightly in garda stations or spend hours on the telephone during the day in an often fruitless quest for places for children.
Developments at Government level include a change of name - the Minister for Health is now the Minister for Health and Children. If something has changed, now is the time for the Minister to make this evident by putting his money and political weight behind efforts to resolve this shameful problem.
In the short-term, the measures sought by Focus Ireland seem to promise immediate relief. In the longer term, a great deal more preventive work is required.
Action must also be taken to address the dispersal of responsibility for children among an increasing number of Government departments. One way to do that would be to establish a National Children's Agency with the clout to cut through the buck-passing and obfuscation which are an inevitable part of the present arrangement.