THE GOVERNMENT must have the laws in place to protect children but “we must also make sure we have the social workers on the ground to get to the families who need them”, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald has said.
Speaking at the opening of the annual Merriman Summer School in Co Clare yesterday, she said the recent report on clerical child sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne “reveals major systemic failures in how the church dealt with child protection and in how the State allowed such failures to occur”.
She said: “We have a lot of work to do to make sure such a breach of trust can never occur again.”
Tackling child safety and protection issues would be achieved partly through the establishment of the Child and Family Support Agency. This was under way and a transition group would hold its first meeting next month, she said.
But she said the responsibility to the 1.4 million children and young people in Ireland went beyond ensuring they were safe, protected and cared for.
“We have a responsibility to ensure that growing up in Ireland means that you have the best start in life available anywhere in the world,” she said.
She added that children were the single most important resource the country had, and giving them the best start was not only the right thing to do but also the way to generate economic success. It was “one of those rare times when altruism and mercenary self-interest share an objective.”
She said that 20 years from now, being smart, well-educated and speaking English would not be anything special.
“We will have several billion peers ticking those boxes. Twenty years from now, we will need people who are entrepreneurial, creative, gifted at design, diplomatic, worldly, insightful, open-minded and confident.”
Ireland had an advantage in being able to draw on its history of learning, science, philosophy and creativity, she said.
“We don’t have to craft a new society from whole cloth, we just have to take the very best of our heritage, history and capacity and make it available early and often.”
The school’s director, Prof Nóirín Hayes of Dublin Institute of Technology, who is a founder member of the Children’s Rights Alliance, said there was a danger that in focusing on the wording of the forthcoming amendment to the Constitution on children’s rights, the objective of improving their quality of life would be lost.
“The greatest problem facing us right now is the increase in child poverty and all that goes with that in terms of poorer school performance, poor health, limiting opportunities. To really meet our responsibilities to children – and respect and recognise them as citizens – we need to rethink how we listen to them, how we discuss aspects of childhood and how we design and implement policy,” she said.
Irish Timesjournalist Fintan O'Toole, speaking on the theme of "Changing childhoods", said that while there had been a necessary focus on the State's failures in protecting children, the lives of the majority of children had improved enormously in recent decades. Children were no longer expected to work if growing up on farms or in shops. The biggest positive change, he believed, was that children now enjoyed going to school.
But there had been a successive failure by political parties in recent years to articulate a vision for nurturing children, he said. Instead, because of their relative powerlessness, they were being pushed to the forefront in bearing the brunt of economic cuts.
The Cumann Merriman, which commemorates the life of the 18th century Clare poet Brian Merriman, continues in Lisdoonvarna until Sunday.