An urgent appeal has gone out in Co Kerry for foster parents. It was made by the Minister for Health and Children, Mr Martin, last weekend, and while the local need is acute, the situation in Kerry merely mirrors the fact that foster carers are also wanted immediately in Cork, Limerick, Galway and Dublin.
Some 3,240 children are in foster care throughout the State, according to the Irish Foster Care Association, of which 900 are in the Eastern Health Authority region which includes Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare. In Cork and Kerry, the Southern Health Board (SHB) region, 583 children are in care and of that number, 75 are being cared for by 70 Kerry families. The association says 10 additional families are needed in the county just to alleviate the demand. In Cork city and county 350 foster homes are providing care for 508 children, but like Kerry and other major centres of population, Cork urgently needs new carers to come forward.
At the launch of the Kerry appeal, Mr Martin said that increasingly children needed help outside the nuclear family. To help cope with the growing demand, he urged families and single people to get in touch with the Southern Health Board or the Irish Foster Care Association. Mr Michael Cahill, chairman of the SHB, said the reasons children needed fostering varied and could include anything from the death of a parent and inability of a single parent to cope, to depression and alcoholism.
Fosterers, he explained, could be married or single, working in or outside the home and were wanted to care for children of all ages, from infants to 18-year-olds.
While the need to place children in care is urgent, the Edith Wilkins Hope Foundation in Cork has asked people not to forget that in some parts of the world, such as Calcutta, the position is bordering on desperate.
The foundation held its sixth annual charity dinner in Cork recently and the £10,000 raised will go towards a health clinic and halfway house for the beleaguered children of Calcutta. Alison O'Connor of this newspaper, who has written the life of the paedophile priest, Father Sean Fortune, was guest speaker at the dinner.