Overview: Despite changes and improvements, there are still grave deficiencies within the childcare system when it comes to supporting troubled children. Liam Reid reports.
These stories do not have happy-ever-after endings. They are the stories of what happened to five troubled children after their cases appeared before the High Court.
One killed himself, two are on the streets, one is in jail, and the other is on his last chance to avoid prison. Between 1995 and 2001 the five appeared, like many other troubled children, before the High Court, as their parents and guardians attempted to force the State to provide adequate care for them.
These cases revealed serious deficiencies in the Irish childcare system, with a lack of proper facilities to deal with the most vulnerable and troubled children. As a result, some had to be held in adult prisons, mental hospitals and even hotels on occasion.
The cases were also noted for the way one particular High Court judge, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, dealt with them. Mr Justice Kelly, who ended up dealing with the majority of the cases, was heavily critical in many of the cases of how the Government and health authorities were dealing with the problem. "It is no exaggeration to characterise what has gone on as a scandal," he said in a 1999 judgment.
Coverage of the issue reached a height in August 2000 when a 15-year-old girl, Kim O'Donovan, was found dead at a city centre B&B, from a suspected overdose.
She had been in care under a High Court order but had absconded from Newtown House, the first secure unit of its kind in the Republic. A subsequent report was highly critical of the quality of care provided to the children in Newtown House. It was one of the factors that led to its closure.
In December 2001, however, the Supreme Court ruled Mr Justice Kelly had crossed the boundary between Government and the courts when he ordered the Government to provide 46 special care places within a certain time period. Since then the number of childcare cases before the High Court has dwindled to a trickle, and three new special care units have been built. The issue has, by and large, disappeared from the public eye.
The Government and health boards have acknowledged there had been a problem but now say it is being tackled in a comprehensive manner, with an investment of over €40 million in new high-support units. There are now more than 100 children in high-support or special care in any given year, costing between 3,000 and 4,000 a week. The success of the support units has been mixed however. Staff working in the field are regarded as being extremely committed professionals working in a very difficult sector. However a lack of staff and other problems have seen some of the units being unable to operate at full capacity.
Ballydowd, in west Dublin, was the flagship special care unit, coming into operation in late 2000, with a capacity for 24 children. There have been serious problems in the running of the centre, including high staff turnover and low staff numbers. It has never been able to cater for such numbers.
Last year the Irish Social Services Inspectorate said the centre was operating in a state of crisis at times. This year's inspection had found there had been considerable improvement in the quality of care and standards at the unit.
However it said there were still improvements needed before it was operating to the standards laid down for special care units. A spokesman for the South Western Area Health Board said the board had accepted the latest recommendations made. "The majority of these have been implemented and the remainder are in the process of being carried out. The board is confident that it is providing a high quality special care service for the young people at Ballydowd."
Overall, and on a national level, childcare experts and children's advocates argue the situation has not improved to any great extent however.
"There probably are more places available, but it is still in crisis," according to Ms Sarah Molloy, a solicitor who has specialised in representing children. Many children still find themselves in high-support, without specific plans for how to care for them and outlining what services should be provided for them.
Ms Molloy also believes the system has become extremely legal. "I have been at meetings where the social workers are taking instructions from their lawyers rather than vice versa."
Poor performance after leaving high-support in Ireland is unfortunately the norm, according to Mr Sean Redmond, juvenile liaison officer with Barnardos.While secure and high-support units were portrayed as an overall solution to the childcare problem, they can lead to children being placed in high-support unnecessarily, he says.
He believes that, while placing children in residential secure units, depriving them of liberty, can be necessary, there is a huge disparity between the rates of placement among health boards. According to Mr Redmond, figures suggest health boards in some areas are much more likely to place children in care. Figures from the late 1990s suggest 10 times as many children in care were in secure high-support and special care units in some eastern areas when compared with those in the west and north-west.
One of the key problems is that, not only does intervention take place too late in many cases, but there is also a lack of coherence between education, health and justice agencies at this stage. Mr Redmond points to the Springboard initiative, which has been in place on a pilot basis around the country, where agencies come together and target at risk children, "family by family" rather than department by department.
"If you take the 9 million that was spent on refurbishing cells at St Patrick's institution, it could be used to fund such programmes in 15 to 20 provincial towns across Ireland. This would have a much greater impact than building new places to hold children."