To Whom It May Concern:
I feel compelled to write this as again it is in the headlines about the miss-treatment of the young people of our country. In the Dáil today there was a debate about the publicising of the report into the death of the tragic Tracey Fay. Tracey was a girl with a troubled background who eventually made it into the care system and died as a result. Last September the RTE programme Prime Time reported on her case and the deaths of a total of 20 young people in care in the last ten years. On this programme Minister Barry Andrews the Minister for Children spoke about the improvements that have since been made and inferred that a case like Tracey’s could never happen again.
Having worked on the periphery of the services that deal with cases like Tracey’s I can categorically say that this is not true. They system that is being talked about is that of ‘Out of Hours’. The Out of Hours system deals with young people whose care or home placements have broken down and there is not a suitable mainstream placement available. It is intended to be an emergency system but in reality young people can end up spending months and in some cases years within it.
The heart of this system is a social work placement service which is facilitated through Garda stations. It requires the young ‘out-of-home’ person to present at a Garda station after 8pm and request to be placed by Out of Hours (OOH). The Gardaí then ring the OOH social work team and inform them of the young person requiring placement. The team then come and assess the young person and if it is not feasible for them to return home they are placed in emergency accommodation. For the over twelve’s this takes two forms: a new residential unit in Donabate, North Co. Dublin, which provides 24hr emergency care to ‘new presenters’ (that is any young person that has not been though the OOH system before) and a hostel in Dublin city centre which provides shelter from 8pm until 9.30am.
The logic behind the 9.30am ‘check-out’ time is that young people of this age should be attending school. However, if a young person’s life is in so much chaos that they arrive in the OOH system it is reasonable to expect that they are not attending school. This means that during the hours of 9.30am and 8pm these children have nothing to do but roam the streets of Dublin. In the past there were drop-in centres for these young people to attend but the same attending school logic removed these services. In their place was put an appointment only keyworking service which also provides lunch from 12-1pm. To make up for this lack of services children between the ages of 12-17 can be given a social welfare type payment at the discretion of their social worker. This is in the region of €30-€60 per week. How anyone can feel that this is a means of caring for these vulnerable children one is never to know. This system leaves children wandering the streets of Dublin city with nothing else to do but get in trouble. It can, and does, lead to crime, drug abuse and prostitution. It also leaves children vulnerable to predators and the negative influence of the adult homeless (many of whom are a product of the same system).
How can a wealthy country (and even in this current recession we are wealthy) justify treating its young in this way is beyond me. Minister Andrews speaks of the difficulty of providing care for the ‘challenging’ children; however, if the interventions were put in earlier it may never have got to that point for many of the young people. Tracey Fay was identified by the health services when she was 8 months old. She was not taken into care until she was 14 years old. I was astounded when the Prime Time programme came out in September and what I had known for a long time was now in the public domain yet the massive outcry and demand for reform that I expected did not happen. What does this say about our society? Do we not care? Are we that self absorbed that children being left to rot in a seriously dysfunctional system does not concern us? I call on the people of Ireland to speak out; to tell their friends, neighbours, colleagues and the government that this is not acceptable, that we will stand for this no longer, and that there must be change. Tell me, do you care enough?
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