Legislation for family support agency due soon

HEALTH COMMITTEE:Legislation to provide for the setting up of the new Child and Family Support Agency will be published shortly, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

Gordon Jeyes, chief executive designate of the agency, said he shared the concerns of Oireachtas health committee members about the time it was taking to establish the new body. He was “as impatient as anyone” at the time it was taking but it was important to “get it right”.

Legislation for the standalone agency, which will take over responsibility for child protection from the Health Service Executive, was expected late last year but has yet to be published. Mr Jeyes said 4,000 HSE staff had been informed they would be transferring to the agency and the number of posts still in dispute was “in single figures”.

Members had earlier expressed concern that some professions would not transfer to the new body. Fergus Finlay, chief executive of Barnardos, said it was “daft” and “crazy” not to move child psychologists and public health nurses from the HSE to the umbrella of the new agency. Public health nurses were “the best early-warning system” for signs of neglect and abuse of children, as they go into every home in the country, and visit newborns five times in their first two years, he said.

Prof Pat Dolan, director of the child and family research centre at NUI Galway, said that unless all the professions were under one umbrella, the new agency wouldn’t impact on children’s lives in the way intended.

“Unless the agency has all the professions in together, it won’t happen,” he said.

However, Independent TD Denis Naughten said transferring public health nurses to the new agency would effectively abolish the role in the HSE. Neglect and abuse were defined by age, he said, and many households could contain older people who were being abused.

By splitting the profession between those dealing with under-18s and those dealing with adults, you would lose some of the impact nurses had, he said.

Mr Finlay said the existing system of child protection had failed. He added that he had never in his working life been more scared about the number of children at risk in Ireland as at present.