Children in Ireland end up in remand centres for stealing sweets and other trivial offences because there is no other way to get help for them, a senior child-care manager says.
In recent years, boys as young as nine have been remanded or sentenced for offences as trivial as damaging the door of the family home, stealing a sister's coat and stealing sweets from a shop for the first time, according to Mr Anthony Keating.
He makes the claim in Curam, a magazine published by the Irish Association of Care Workers in which he is described as the deputy director of a remand and assessment unit in Dublin. The allegation comes on the day Cardinal Basil Hume is to address an audience in Dublin on the needs of marginalised children.
"These children did not end up in court due to a ruthless desire for retribution by the judiciary, juvenile liaison officers or their parents, but rather as the only response of concerned adults who were attempting to care for children at risk or in pain," he writes.
Mr Keating's claim is in line with the recent report by the Government to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in which it admitted it could not raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 because the social services could not cope with the number of seven to 12-year-olds needing help.
Mr Keating writes that children remanded for these reasons "notice that other children in the unit who have committed serious criminal offences are going home or on to long-term placements, and they start to ask why they are locked up in a young offenders' unit when they haven't done anything wrong.
"Eventually their behaviour starts to deteriorate and they begin to think that the workers in the unit are lying to them along with their parents and social worker. They may abscond from the unit, often with a more sophisticated peer, and may well end up with the criminal record that they did not have on their arrival."
Mr Noel Howard, chairman of the Irish Association of Care Workers said there was a need for more services for children in the community but that there would always be some who needed good quality residential care. The scandals that had occurred had obscured the many success stories in which children who had gone through residential care had made stable and satisfying lives.
The Resident Managers' Association has also called for more investment in residential care and for the early creation of the promised social services inspectorate to assess the quality of care provided.