A man who raised concerns about ‘Grace’, an intellectually disabled young woman who experienced severe neglect in an unvetted foster placement, says the State’s response will act as a “strong deterrent to whistleblowers”.
Speaking after the publication of a commission of inquiry’s final report on Grace’s treatment, Iain Smith told RTÉ radio’s News at One of the “big toll” the case took on him “emotionally, financially” and on his family.
The report, published on Tuesday, said there were failures in relation to the standard of care provided to Grace while in the care of a family over a period of 20 years. But it said evidence did not exist to support allegations that Grace was subjected to sexual, emotional or physical abuse while in care.
“It’s still taking a toll because my family are looking at this report today and thinking what on earth was this all about?” Mr Smith said, adding that he believed the findings would be “a very strong deterrent to whistleblowers in Ireland”.
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“I think anyone who’s thinking of coming forward in Ireland, and divulging tales of abuse that they have heard in their workplace, needs to know what the State can do to you. The State can crush you. The State will try to crush you.”
Mr Smith said he was in “quite a trusted position” within the HSE’s frontline services when he received a call from Grace’s biological mother asking how her daughter was doing.
[ Q&A: Who is ‘Grace’ and what happened in her case?Opens in new window ]
He said he was surprised that someone aged over 18 was still in foster care so he investigated the case and found “about a thousand files” on paper but not on the computer system.
He said he delved into these and found allegations going back a long way of child sexual abuse involving the foster placement. He then arranged to meet Grace.
“When I met Grace, I was – I think the word is – horrified. My colleague and I we were just horrified at the foster carer [over] some of the comments that she made,” Mr Smith said.
“She was drawing our attention to how slim Grace was and she said, ‘you know, she thinks she’s 16′, which is a very bizarre thing to say about an adult with a learning disability, you know, whose mental age is between one or two years of age.
“So these are grossly inappropriate things that the carer was saying. So what I did was I wrote it all up in a report, as I’m very experienced at doing many reports like that.”
He said he advised that the HSE should “proceed immediately to the High Court” seeking to have Grace made a ward of court with a view to finding her a safe place to live.
Despite his report being filed in January 2008, it was July 2009 before Grace was removed from the placement. During that time, Mr Smith and another whistleblower brought Grace to hospital as they were concerned about her injuries.
“The files were taken off me in April 2008 and I was advised not to work on the case any more.”
He said he was advised not to write to the mother to tell her what was going on or to seek files under Freedom of Information laws.
Mr Smith said he gave 700 hours of his time to the Farrelly commission, being questioned over 27 days. He said he wrote to then minister for health Simon Harris in May 2019 “saying the whole thing should be shut down” because it was obvious to him then the inquiry was “a project that is going absolutely nowhere”.
He said the content of the final report came as “no surprise at all” as it followed on from previous reports that were “fundamentally of no use whatsoever”.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher, the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, said more answers about the Grace case came from the two whistleblowers and work in the Public Accounts Committee than in the report published on Tuesday.
She said it “seems to me that it doesn’t answer core questions about what happened to Grace and why, and accountability for what happened to Grace and, most importantly, it doesn’t address ongoing issues about risks to children now”.
Ms Gallagher said one of the most horrifying parts of the report was the length of time it took to bring what happened to Grace to light.
“We know that Grace was placed in foster care when she was aged 11 in 1989. It was supposed to be short term. The first time that a qualified social worker visited her at all was in 1995, six years later when she age 17. So throughout that six year period, all of her teenage years, she was not seen,” Ms Gallagher said.
“And what’s really important is what was during that time the Brothers of Charity raised concerns about the home. They stopped placing young people there [from 1991] after information that they learned about Mr X.”
Grace left the home 20 years later “with nothing more than the clothes on her back and not a cent of the €70,000 disability allowance paid in her own name since the age of 18 and with the telltale bruises on her body that Iain [Smith] has spoken about”, Ms Gallagher said.
