State care of children goes far beyond institutions and the rare, headline-grabbing cases of inappropriate placement. The vast majority are fostered in normal family settings by people who open their homes but the costs, as well as the benefits, are huge, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
IN ANOTHER LIFE Annette Burrowes and Breda O’Donovan might be running their own companies. In this life these warm, highly competent women are long-term foster carers. They are also extremely weary of the relentlessly negative stories about fostering.
Internal HSE audits from 2011, which surfaced last week, indicated that children were being placed with families that had criminal convictions and histories of alcohol abuse. For example, some children in the midlands had been placed with a relative who was “unsuitable and unapproved”, had serious criminal convictions, a “long history” of admittance to HSE services and, unsurprisingly, had previously been rejected as a foster carer.
The reports, details of which were published by the Irish Examiner, bore out concerns raised in previous audits that have been highlighted in The Irish Times and other media in recent years. One of the latest findings was that some carers had been looking after foster children for more than four months before being vetted by the Garda. And all this was revealed in the context of the recent devastating independent report on the deaths of 196 children in State care.
But it’s not the whole story. For “State care” also read Burrowes and O’Donovan. Their voices are absent from the regular eruptions of blame and counterblame, and for good reason. Child confidentiality is paramount. Yet these are the people who remain ever-ready to receive a stranger’s child – a child who could be very damaged, distraught, disruptive or traumatised – into their home.
The call might come with an hour’s notice: a child alleges sexual abuse against a family member and is taken straight from school to the foster carer by the HSE. The call often comes when the rest of the population is winding down: at 5.30pm on a Friday or a bank holiday. One woman was taking her own four children to see Santa on Christmas Eve when she got a call to say she would be having two more little ones for Christmas dinner and Santa presents.
A further twist is that the foster carer has no way of knowing when their care of that child will end. Sometimes a small boy comes for the weekend and is still there 25 years later, thoroughly integrated or maybe even engaged to the neighbour’s daughter. In the early days the foster parent might have had to ring the Garda and ask for the boy’s mother to be removed from the neighbourhood, because she was going from door to door bellowing that the foster parent had taken her child.
“Your job is to look after that child until the child is in a position to go home. That’s it,” says Burrowes. “Some come in under horrendous circumstances, but those are the equivalent of the 10-car pile-ups on the motorways. They’re the ones you read about. But for the majority of foster carers there are very few issues. They have a good relationship with the social worker. The children are part of the family; they go to school, college, get jobs, have good outcomes. You don’t hear about the ‘small’ things.”
The day the shocking report on deaths in State care was published, Laura was in Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, at the bedside of her 22-year-old foster child. He had been brought to her at the age of two, for six weeks, but had stayed to grow up with her family, with relatively few issues. That all changed four years ago, when his birth father died by suicide. Since then the boy has taken many drug overdoses and has been found lying, unconscious, across the grave. “I remember sitting at his bedside the day that report came out and saying to a friend, ‘This child could be one of those deaths in that report, and it won’t be the HSE’s fault.’ Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault . . . One day, I will be sitting with that poor boy’s dead body, I know that.”
Carmel, a foster carer in Cork, recalls having to shut out a foster child whose drink and drug abuse was threatening to destroy Carmel’s own family. “I had to close the door on her and say goodbye. I had to think of the other children in the house. She was over 18 and out of care, and I did have contact with social workers, but I made that decision.” That story ended happily. The girl is clean and back with Carmel. “But she was gone for months and could easily have ended up on that list of deaths in State care.”
The stories about children bouncing between as many as 30 placements evoke sighs from seasoned foster carers. “They’re teenagers first and in care second,” says Burrowes. “If they don’t want to be in care they’ll do everything to get out of there. Normally what they want is to get moved back home. You can guide, help, support and do everything you possibly can for teenagers, but if they decide they want another path you can’t make them.”
IN AN ODDsense this is the good-news story of fostering. For the most part "State care" does what it says. A few hundred very disturbed children will end up in secure, astronomically expensive residential care, but well over 90 per cent of children in State care – about 5,600 – are placed in normal family settings, such as Breda's, Annette's, Laura's or Carmel's. That compares with about 75 per cent in the US and fewer in the UK.
“I do think there is something about the Irish as a nation, valuing children, not wanting to institutionalise them”, says Diarmuid Kearney, director of the Irish Foster Care Association (Ifca). “Of course part of that is the appalling reputation of institutions and the reluctance to place them there. But people who foster are unbelievably generous. The allowance does nothing to compensate them for the 24-hour care of some very difficult children who come with exceptional needs.”
The allowance appears attractive. The current rates are €325 weekly for each child under 12 and €352 for over-12s. But apart from the 24-hour care and challenge, the IFCA points out that it is not uncommon for a baby or toddler to turn up with nothing but the clothes on their back. Everything then has to be bought out of the allowance, and if the child is moved on, so are those purchases. There are numerous stories of foster carers stepping in to pay for grinds or for timely orthodontic treatment.
The 2011 report of the Ombudsman for Children highlighted the terrible personal, emotional and financial expense experienced by foster carers trying to do the best for a child with special needs.
There is anecdotal evidence that fostering can wreak huge divisions within families, between the fostering couple themselves and among their own children. The presence of a disturbed and challenging teenager will be exacerbated by strictures such as keeping certain doors open or closed, which is particularly relevant if a foster child has been sexually abused, and ensuring that boundaries are maintained.Although media coverage might imply that registering as a foster carer is easy, there is nothing half-hearted about the assessment process when it kicks in. “They rake over your childhood, and there’s huge questioning about your relationships with parents and siblings, your schooling, how you dealt with alcohol and drugs, about ex-boyfriends and partners and how you dealt with the break-ups. They ask about medical treatment. They ask your children about your relationship with your husband or partner. They even ask you if you have a healthy sex life . . . Every reference is taken up and checked for additional information, and you then have to appear in front of a fostering panel of 12 people,” says Burrowes.
All understand the need for it. “But it’s one of the reasons foster carers get so upset when they see all those negative media reports; they themselves have been through the most extremely intrusive, intimate assessment,” says O’Donovan.
Another foster carer recalls it as “intense and gruelling . . . The questions made me think very hard about my relationship with my mother, and that was upsetting. But I was glad of that. It has to be thorough.”
The assessment is followed by a training course. “That’s when a lot of prospective foster carers will drop out, because the reality of what you’re taking on is becoming clear and you’re having to ask yourself a lot of questions. Basically, it’s self-assessment,” says Burrowes.
The upshot is that women and men such as these enter the field after much consideration and as much preparation as the system allows, and thus have some intimation of the challenges. The problems often arise for those known as “relative carers” – 30 to 40 per cent of the total of about 4,000 – who are suddenly called on to do something as life-changing as taking full responsibility for a child. “They might have been sitting in front of the television with a beer and suddenly got a call. We know what we’re getting into, but they really don’t,” says O’Donovan.
A big problem is that, in such emergencies, the usual assessment and Garda-vetting requirements can be overlooked or abandoned altogether. “Many of the unassessed carers are relatives of the children placed with them,” says Diarmuid Kearney of Ifca. “Not only have many of them not been vetted or trained, but for too long they have been less than adequately supported by the HSE, frequently not being visited by a social worker unless there is a problem.”
The HSE’s response is that “in some cases the timescale within which a child requires a placement does not provide time for full clearance in advance of the placement, particularly in emergency situations where a family member may be identified as an appropriate placement.”
It says “this decision to place a child is based upon a risk assessment of the family. In these circumstances, the vetting procedures are followed as soon as possible after the placement has commenced.”
That does not stand up, says Kearney.
“It should, in these circumstances, be possible to place children on a temporary basis with fully vetted and trained carers. Similarly, the HSE’s statement that 85 per cent of carers have been approved by Foster Care Panels means that 15 per cent – about 350 carers – have not. Over the past number of years Hiqa has highlighted this serious risk to children, and we had hoped that the matter was being addressed with all urgency.”
The official preference for children to be placed with relatives makes sense. They remain among familiar people, places, friends and schools. “If you were suddenly taken to hospital, where would you want your kids to go?” says Burrowes. “Probably to your sister or brother.”
The argument against, says another foster carer carefully, is that “the problem, whether it’s criminality or some kind of abuse, may run through the entire extended family . . . There are no guarantees. There has to be assessment.”
Ifca receives a lot of calls from grandparents. A son or daughter could be on drugs and the grandchild be badly affected, so the grandparents will take the child. But now the child is not in formal care and there is no legal protection. “The grandparents are using their pensions to raise that child; they have no rights or income for the child, and if they look for maintenance, they’re told [they] have to prove abandonment. And prison, for example, does not qualify as abandonment. At that stage the child is not at risk because the grandparents are suitable carers. But what happens when the grandparents move into their 70s and 80s? The child is now in his teens and could well be at risk. Imagine the cost of that to the State,” says O’Donovan.
EVEN WHERE THEREis State involvement, successive reports show a history of unacceptable burdens being placed on foster carers. A Hiqa inspection of the Dublin North West fostering service in 2011 revealed that a third of foster-care cases were not allocated to a social worker.
Supervision and access orders can also be problematic. Carers note an increasing trend among social workers to demand that foster carers transport children to and from family-access visits, in some cases more than an hour’s drive away, and to give the child money for meals or treats. “Because our allowance hasn’t been cut, some foster carers have been told this is what you’re paid to do,” says Burrowes.
Lines are also crossed when foster carers are asked to provide supervision during access times. This situation is highly undesirable if relations between foster carer and birth parent are already fraught. “Supervision is absolutely the role of the HSE,” says O’Donovan.
Where such responsibility is handed over to the foster carer, it can affect the whole family. “Access is brilliant, and very important, but it has to be agreed and negotiated. Foster care works because the children are being reared in a normal family, but that brings its own difficulties. If a court orders access [to the child’s parents or family] from 3pm to 6pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and it’s an hour away, what do you do with your own children for all that time? If access orders are for Saturday or Sunday, how does that work for the foster child’s involvement with the local football team?”
Ifca’s prebudget submission last winter noted that “respect” is a word often spoken of by foster carers. “Sometimes, the feeling is that the respect is not there and the attitude is, ‘I’m the professional, I know best’,” says one foster parent in north Dublin. “Some of them are so young and you just know they’ve grown up in fairly privileged circumstances.”
Marian, already an experienced counsellor living outside Dublin, encountered another kind of problem when she opted for fostering. Because of her circumstances, she stated clearly that she could not cope with teenagers, or children with disabilities, and specified children of primary-school age. She was introduced to a little girl, and it was only after Marian had established some rapport with the child that the social worker revealed that she had a disability.
It was months into the placement before she got the little girl’s psychological report, which would have made her much more aware of the child’s traumatic background. The process was repeated with a very challenging teenager. She feels she was manipulated. “I remember sitting on the sofa with this very young social worker and her insisting, ‘You’re great with teenagers; that’s probably because you’re childlike yourself.’ And I thought, So that’s how they see me, a big softie.”
But there are also reports of magnificent professionals, of social workers “who are never more than a text or phone call away”, in the words of Nuala, in west Dublin, who is rearing two children of different relatives. “The HSE listened when I was worrying about how the first child was being treated [by the relative], and they’re always there now when I need them. My social worker is just brilliant. I have her mobile number, and if I text her she’ll always get back to me.”
Nuala was very shocked when she heard about a recent court case involving a foster carer who had criminal convictions. “I can’t imagine that happening. I have a sister who’s putting in for general fostering, and she’s doing all the training and getting vetted even though she fostered her own grandchildren. When I took on the second child I had to do another medical and get clearance from the Garda all over again. And I’m in constant training. But I love it. I love going to the courses and talking to the other foster carers . . . I’m blessed with these children. They’re so settled. I tell the little boy just to say he lives with his aunt and uncle and cousins, so he doesn’t have to say he’s in foster care. They call me Mam now.”
Mostly, foster carers perceive social workers as doing their best, says Burrowes. They sense that a blame game is going on, that accountability has not been fairly distributed between responsible departments.
Diarmuid Kearney of Ifca is “very optimistic”, however. “A whole area of neglect is being exposed, but I think what we are seeing now is less about any immediate issue and more about a legacy of neglect over many years. We believe Minister [for Children] Frances Fitzgerald and [the HSE’s director of children and family services] Gordon Jeyes are very, very serious about listening and driving reform.”
