A SCHOOL attendance and education welfare service is to be established throughout the State and administered by the proposed education boards.
This was announced by the Minister of State for Education, Mr Austin Currie, who said that it was the key recommendation of the task force on truancy which he had established last year and which had now completed its report. "Of necessity, this will have to be a medium term objective because of the staffing implications.
He said the current legal frame work governing this area was the 1926 School Attendance Act, which established a school attendance service in the boroughs of Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Dun Laoghaire only. Monitoring: of school attendance outside those areas was the responsibility of the Garda, said Mr Currie.
There had been vast population changes in the past 70 years, and the result was that the rapidly growing suburbs of Dublin, for instance, including some areas of extreme social disadvantage, were without a professional school attendance service.
One of the first steps to be taken was to gather reliable data on the true extent of the problem. "There is, in fact, an absence of reliable data on the extent of school non attendance. This is one of the issues which the new legislation will have to address."
Mr Currie, who has special responsibility for children, said that "our hypocritical past is catching up with us." Recent exposures of child abuse and neglect underlined that cherishing all of the children equally was, for too many, mere empty rhetoric. "We have to face the possibility that what has been exposed so far is just the tip of the iceberg. God only knows what untold horrors yet remain to be disclosed."
But the reality was that the major concern must be for the children of today and tomorrow. "I have no doubt that at this moment, today, there are children out there who are being abused and neglected. That is the awful current fact of life. It is my determination that everything we can do will be done to stamp out this awful evil in our midst."
