Spending on preventive services for children by the Eastern Health Board is to fall because of the "astronomical" cost of building secure units, a child care expert has warned.
Mr Robbie Gilligan, senior lecturer in social work at Trinity College, Dublin was responding to a lecture on "The Marginalised Child" by Cardinal Basil Hume in Dublin last night.
A warning that foster care was not suitable for all children in care and that some needed residential care was given by Prof Dorota Iwaniec, head of the social work department at Queen's University, Belfast, who was also responding to Cardinal Hume's lecture.
Only 19 per cent of Eastern Health Board child-care spending was devoted to work aimed at preventing children from coming into care, Mr Gilligan said, the remainder being spent on "fire brigade measures".
Spending on prevention was "likely to be shrunk further in the EHB region as the Eastern Health Board prepares to spend astronomical sums on the building and running of 48 places in euphemistically-titled high support units, which are in effect secure units in which to detain children whose behaviour is so difficult that they cannot be contained in open settings.
"The problem of course is that the more of these places you open the more you fill. International experience suggests running them is like pouring money down a drain - both in terms of soaring costs and ineffectual outcomes."
Much more money needed to be spent on child-care services "because we have to roll back the effect of close on 70 years of neglect".
Prof Iwaniec said isolated cases of persistent abuse and malpractice in some residential homes had brought the sector into disrepute "and consequently led to massive reduction of these worthwhile and necessary child-placement facilities".
"Yet the majority of residential homes, whether state, voluntary or private, are doing extremely good work in spite of adverse circumstances and publicity. They care for and deal with the most damaged children in our society."
Children old enough and capable of making decisions should be allowed a choice of whether they wanted to live in foster or residential care, she said.