A judge said last night that it should not fall to the High Court to have to bring pressure to bear to ensure that places of security were provided for vulnerable children.
Mr Justice Kelly, who has dealt with numerous cases of troubled children being left without secure therapeutic facilities, asked why such crisis cases were continually coming before the courts.
This was not the way to run a policy dealing with the welfare of the most vulnerable citizens in the State - young children from deprived backgrounds who needed protection. The question of finding accommodation for such children was constantly recurring.
The judge was dealing with the case of a 17-year-old girl which he described as "tragic". He said she had had no involvement with the criminal law yet the court was being forced in a crisis situation to bring pressure to bear to secure what was the child's right.
Before Christmas the girl had escaped from a health board placement. She was said to have been effectively a prisoner of two dangerous and violent men in a flat described as "unfit for human habitation". She was found by gardai after a widespread search. She had escaped again, for a number of hours, earlier this week.
On Wednesday, the judge had issued injunctions restraining the two men - a father and son - from attempting to contact, interfere with or harbour the girl. He continued those orders yesterday.
After a number of court hearings yesterday, at which the difficulties in finding a suitable secure place for the girl were referred to, the judge was told last night that it was now proposed that she would stay at an unnamed premises where four staff - two security personnel and two psychiatric nurses - would be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Mr Justice Kelly banned publication of the name or location of the premises or of any of the individuals involved in the case.
A health board representative said that the girl would be the only child in the premises. The place was secure but not in the sense that it would be locked. There would be security around the building.
There would be four "waking people" there always and the girl would be their sole charge.
It was envisaged that the girl could be there for about a month. She wanted to live in a residential home.
Directing that the girl now go to the location proposed, Mr Justice Kelly said it would have been too awful to contemplate if a place had not been found for her. It had been made possible with an enormous expenditure on resources and an enormous strain on manpower. He added: "It really ought not to have to fall to the High Court, month in and month out, to have to provide pressure of this sort to obtain this sort of solution."
It was being done in circumstances in which the accommodation for her was being "patched together at the eleventh hour" only as a result of the court making it clear that it would settle for nothing less.
Mr Justice Kelly said he was glad for the child's sake that she was going to a place which was secure but did not have about it any element of criminal detention. If the place now available had not been provided, he would have been left in the appalling situation of having to send her to a secure detention facility, of which there was only one available - the women's section of Mountjoy Prison. This would not have been suitable for a young woman with no criminal record.