Garda difficulties on vetting may shut hostels

Voluntary hostels and day services for homeless teenagers and children may be forced to close, or employ staff who have not been vetted by the Garda, hostel operators claimed yesterday.

The hostels and day centres were told by letter from the Garda vetting unit this week that only full-time staff employed directly by health boards can be vetted.

The Garda said it did not have the resources to check up on staff working outside the immediate health board sector.

With about 12 hostels in Dublin, about 120 bed-nights for homeless teenagers are affected in the capital alone, with day care, educational and recreational services for homeless youths also affected. A small number of hostels run directly by the health boards are not affected.

The issue is to be raised at a meeting between the health boards, gardaí and care workers today.

Following receipt of the letters from the Garda, hostels and day care centres claim they are in a catch-22 situation as they are required by the health boards to only employ full-time staff who have been vetted by the Garda. Failure to comply with this stricture would result in the hostels not being registered by the health boards, which would result in funding being withheld.

In the past the hostels and day care centres overcame the problem by passing on a list of all full-time staff members to the health boards which in turn passed this on to the Garda.

However, according to Father Peter McVerry, who runs a number of hostels in Dublin for homeless youths, the Garda have recently said this is no longer acceptable.

"It is just one arm of the State not knowing what the other arm is doing. Here we have the State telling us through the health boards that we must have staff vetted by the gardaí and the other arm of the State, the gardaí, saying that they will not vet our staff," said Father McVerry. He said the problem was particularly difficult as it meant young homeless people could have no services ranging from somewhere to go during the day for recreation and educational facilities to washing and clothes washing, as well as having nowhere to sleep.

A Garda spokesman told The Irish Times last night that "there are guidelines by which we work: if they don't qualify, they don't qualify. The real situation is that we never did vet staff unless they were wholly and full-time, directly employed by the health board or one or two agencies."

The Garda spokesman added however that there was an interdepartmental working group "looking at that at the moment".

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice added that the working group was made up from staff of the health boards, the Department and the Garda. While the working group had given a commitment to examining the arrangements for vetting full-time staff in voluntary hostels, its report on the issue was not yet published. The spokeswoman acknowledged that although the current regulations require the Garda to only vet those in direct health board, full-time employment, voluntary staff had been vetted in the past.

She pointed out that the working group is chaired by the Garda and the group has said a decision on whether to extend its vetting to the voluntary sector would be made in "due course". A timetable for the committee's report on the issue would occur "in the coming months", she said.