A judge specialising in childcare cases has said social workers in Ireland have "impossibly large caseloads", "scarce resources" and do not have the technology a modern agency requires.
In a paper on childcare cases before the courts, published in the Courts Service's Family Law Matters report yesterday, Judge Conal Gibbons said that hostels accommodating unaccompanied minors "often have appeared to have minimal levels of staffing".
This is was a likely contributor to the fact that some of these children went missing, he said.
The report, compiled by family law reporter Dr Carol Coulter, found that neglect was the single biggest reason why children were taken into care by the Health Service Executive in 2005.
Some 60 per cent of the 2,309 children taken into care in 2005 were removed because they were neglected by their parents. More than 12 per cent had been physically abused, almost 7 per cent had been sexually abused and 6 per cent had been emotionally abused.
The majority were taken into care voluntarily, with the permission of their parent or legal guardian and more than 90 per cent were placed with relatives of their parents or in foster homes.
Judge Gibbons, who sits in the Dublin Metropolitan District Court, said that at times proper assessments of children are not made.
"I accept that social workers and the HSE do a difficult job, and people do not become social workers in order to make money - they are caring people," he said.
"At times, though, there is little or no communication between the duty social workers and the assigned teams in different areas."
He said the system in Ireland was not unlike that in the UK, with social workers dealing with "impossibly large caseloads, in a climate of scarce resources and crisis management".
He also highlighted the 200 unaccompanied children "washed up on our shore" every year. He suggested courts should inquire about the standards of accommodation in which these children are placed.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan said he could understand Judge Gibbons's concerns about unaccompanied children. The HSE had spent an amount of money on accommodation in the Dún Laoghaire area for them. Many were aged 16 or 17 and were a difficult group to control, he said. "They do not all go missing by accident. Some of them do want to move out and they take that option."
He said the Minister for Children was preparing proposals for an integrated approach to child welfare, and the relevant services and professionals would be built around the District Courts.
