That nearly 2,500 children in the Eastern Health Board region are awaiting the attention of a social worker is alarming - all the more so because the number has climbed from 1,000 just two years ago. Granted, with many of these children, perhaps a majority, investigation will reveal that concerns about ill-treatment or neglect are unfounded. That is what experience in Ireland and elsewhere suggests. However, if even a few hundred are in dangerous situations, it is disturbing that nothing is done for them. It is important to bear in mind what is involved here: children neglected to the extent that they are physically, intellectually and socially retarded; children battered and beaten; children exposed to deliberate mental cruelty which will cause them severe emotional pain for the rest of their lives. And children sexually abused.
What is to be done? Part of the answer lies in expanding the number of foster parents in the region - yet social workers are too busy coping with the existing crisis to assess, promptly, the families who want to become foster parents. In 1996, approximately 500 people told the Eastern Health Board they were interested in finding out more about fostering. Yet the EHB got just over 20 new foster parents that year.
A large part of the problem, an internal report pointed out, was that in many cases social workers simply did not have the time to assess the applicants; they are too busy finding places in existing foster families or in residential care centres to be able to assess prospective foster parents. Social workers should be appointed whose only function is to assess fostering applications. Such moves are on the way in the EHB region - but they need to be expanded and speeded up significantly.
Another part of the remedy must be to create and expand support services for the extended families of children who are at risk. Very often it is these families - uncles, aunts, grandparents - who are the first port of call for social workers seeking places for children. In theory, children should be better off with relatives than with strangers. But for this to work it is important that back-up services and financial support be provided for these families, many of whom already have their own children to cope with.
There must surely be a role, too, for an expansion of high-quality residential care for those children whom foster families would find it impossible to cope with because of their excessive need for attention, or for siblings who would otherwise be split up. There are some moves afoot in the EHB to provide extra facilities - but to so modest an extent that the effect will hardly be noticeable.
There is a great deal of merit too in the suggestion by the new president of the Irish Association of Social Workers, Ms Imelda Keogh, that an Ombudsman for Children be appointed. Such an official could tackle individual cases of neglect of children's needs by officialdom and bring them to light by publishing the facts. Unfortunately this very process would embarrass officialdom - which is why sceptics doubt it will happen.