SOME CHILDREN in care have never heard the word `No' but care-workers fear that attempts to discipline or control them will be seen as an infringement of their rights, a conference heard yesterday.
Mr Noel Howard, president of the Irish Association of Care Workers, also warned against regulating homes for children in care so that they became no more than "barren, regulation-ridden clinics".
The Tanaiste, Mr Spring, who opened the IACW's 25th annual conference in Killarney, said more must be done to prevent children being taken into care in the first place.
Care-workers increasingly have to deal with instances of very dangerous behaviour by some children in care, Mr Howard said. "A number of the children we deal with, some of them frighteningly young, have never had the word No said to them.
"Sometimes these children equate our kindness with weakness and can be precocious, provocative and destructive. The dilemma for care-workers very often can be that an attempt to bring a modicum of discipline and structure to such a child's life can be interpreted as an infringement of that child's rights.
"There has been much woolly-headed thinking in this regard and remarkable mental gymnastics engaged in to suggest that such children's rights are absolute.
"If such children are given that enormous sense of power which tells them they can literally do what they like without consequences then we, as carers, have much to answer for."
If children get to a stage where they feel they are in charge then, said Mr Howard, "I would suggest that is a form of abuse too on the part of those who care for them".
In the past, care had been good for some children, he said. It had made their lives "liveable, balanced and productive". But other children had been betrayed by care and this betrayal had left care-workers confused, outraged and isolated.
The introduction of a workable system of checks and balances may go some small way to indicating that we take seriously the heavy burden of pain some adults carry with them because of what was done to them as children".
But "in seeking to redress the wrongs of the past, let us be careful not to lose what was good in it," he said.
It was important not to introduce rules and regulations that dilute and stunt compassion, warmth, security and a sense of fun.
"Such barren, regulation-ridden clinics, because that is all they will be, will be no respecters of personality or individual ability and will," he said.
Mr Howard called for a standard procedure for investigating complaints against care-workers.
In the absence of such a procedure, staff were left "in some social and legal limbo where they wait daily for a phone call or letter to let them know what happens next".
Mr Spring said there were 900 more staff employed to support families and care for children than in 1992.
"We need to focus more attention on services which will prevent child abuse, family breakdown and the need to take children into care," he said.
"In recent years we have attempted to target new resources towards these preventive services. One of our aims must be to concentrate increasing support for programmes such as family resource centres, neighbourhood youth projects, day nurseries, parenting courses and community mothers programmes."
The conference continues today.