THE Minister of State in charge of child care, Mr Austin Currie, will make a statement on the Western Health Board's report on the Kelly Fitzgerald case during question time in the Dail this afternoon. He finally received a copy of the report at the weekend.
Fianna Fail's health spokeswoman, Ms Maire Geoghegan Quinn, will ask the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, and Mr Currie why neither of them had requested a copy of the report until it was extensively leaked to the Irish Independent last week.
She will call for publication of the report and for a Dail debate on it with full privilege.
Ms Geoghegan Quinn said yesterday the Government was "long fingering" the issue of mandatory reporting of child abuse in its Putting Children First discussion document.
"This problem is becoming bigger and bigger, and it's time to face up to it finally," she said. "Putting children first means introducing mandatory reporting. That is the only way a person making a report of child abuse in good faith can be legally indemnified."
She acknowledged it was a complex issue, but said that the necessary safeguards and guidelines could be put in place only after the Government had decided that mandatory reporting would be introduced. Only then would the professionals involved be put in the position of having to sit down and work out how to implement it.
She said she would also be raising other recommendations of the Kelly Fitzgerald report such as an "at risk" register for vulnerable children and protocols for passing information from one health board area to another and one country to another.
"This is all tied with the lack of a mandatory reporting system in this country," she said. "There is no national standard. Each health board operates a policy in its own area which is not necessarily the policy next door. That is wrong.
"It's not the health boards' fault. It should be a matter of national policy It's up to the Minister to lay down rules that an independent child care authority could then implement."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said that the issue of schools nominating a teacher to develop expertise in identifying child abuse - another recommendation of the report - was currently being studied by a departmental working group, along with all aspects of child abuse as it affected schools. She said this group would be reporting in a couple of months.
The chief executive of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Mr Cian O Tighearnaigh, said the main lesson of the Kerry Fitzgerald report, like the Kilkenny incest report before it, was the need for mandatory reporting of child abuse.
More immediately, he said, the Department of Health, those in charge of its childcare division and the Western Health Board (WHB) had to make a "clear public statement that the system had failed in the Kerry Fitzgerald case and that the kind of child protection offered to Kerry Fitzgerald was unacceptable and should not be repeated."
He expressed anger that even in announcing the internal inquiry into the case, the WHB chief executive officer, Mr Eamonn Hannan, had said he was absolutely satisfied that good practice had been followed by the board.
He said anyone with child protection experience should have realised that the danger which had earlier led Kelly to being put on an "at risk" register in London - from which she had been removed when she "blossomed" on going to live with her grandmother was re created" when she moved to Ireland.
He pointed out that the board had already been involved with the Fitzgeralds when another child in the family was hospitalised with injuries, including cigarette burns to her body, as a result of excessive discipline.
He was not calling for sanctions against the social workers or other professionals involved. "This was a system failure, a huge failure of managements.