OPINION/Kathryn Holmquist: Services for children will never be enough, the Minister for Children, Brian Lenihan, stated recently on RTÉ Radio 1 in response to my criticism that children were left behind in the Budget. No, Minister. We must always have enough for children. If there is one area of spending where our priorities should be totally straight, sufficient and accountable, it is children.
Yet I'm glad that he said it. Because it's a line I've heard many times before from the Minister for Health, Michael Martin, and others in their attempts to justify their policies.
Their thinking is that you and I, average citizens, demand too much. In a way, they're right. We want to keep our tax rates low while also benefiting from the State's safety net of health and social services. But when road tax and VAT on cars rise, we complain as if the use of the road was a God-given right rather than something we should pay for.
We're all like Winona Ryder, believing we can steal and no one will notice. But somebody has to pay. Winona got 300 hours of community service as a reality check. I'd like to see Charlie McCreevy doing community service with families living in poverty and children with special needs.
I'd like to have seen McCreevy and Martin in the ambulance with baby Bronagh as she struggled for breath after being turned away from Monaghan General Hospital. The experience may have taught them what parents under stress already know, which is that the ethics of Government policies are out of touch with the reality of people's lives.
And in my more idealistic moments, I believe that the death of baby Bronagh might convince us all that we voted for a pig in a poke when last May we chose a Government that promises improved services while keeping taxes low.
For the Government, the ethics of the provision of social services like health, education and family support are simple: create streamlined efficiency which offers sufficient services for the least amount of money.
This is best for most people most of the time. They argue that centres of excellence, whether in maternity services or cancer care, can give more people better quality of service for less money most of the time. And if you're basing your argument purely on economics rather than ethics they are right.
But life isn't an economic software programme. The fact that some citizens may pay great personal costs in their attempt to travel to these services means that somebody will always fall through the cracks.
BABY Bronagh fell through the cracks. She may have cried all the way from Monaghan to Drogheda in her protests, but she was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Martin countered that we have a superb neo-natal emergency service - and that's true. But the service is superb statistically, not in individual cases.
Baby Bronagh exposed Government efficiency for what it is - soulless and unethical. So did Susan Maher, who died in a car crash after rising at 4 a.m. to bring her five-year-old son, Bobby, from Kilkenny to Dublin for speech and language services. Susan had struggled to get her son the services he needed from the day he was born. If you follow the Government's reasoning, maybe Susan wanted too much. In their attempts to convince us of the virtues of the "never enough" philosophy, Government uses two basic spins: the first is to lessen our perceptions of the need. The second is to massage statistics, which we all know can justify anything in amenable hands.
An administrator in a major Dublin hospital confessed to me recently that the job consisted of providing statistics to the Department of Health in a dizzying array of formats. The same numbers could be interpreted in different ways, depending on how the Department asked the question. This administrator devotes 40 well-paid hours per week to manipulating numbers to suit whoever asks the question.
Changing our perceptions of children's needs is a major goal of a Government that believes in the less is more philosophy. Take the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey's claim that we have a surfeit of special education teachers and classroom assistants. Twelve per cent of Irish schoolchildren are receiving some form of special education, compared with an average of just 3 per cent throughout the EU.
Here's the reality: one in 10 Irish schoolchildren have serious problems, according to a report by the Clondalkin Partnership. In Boston, 17 per cent of children receive special teaching. In the UK, this figure is 20 per cent. My money is on Clondalkin's estimate, which cannot be compared to the other countries in Europe because European education is vastly more child-friendly, introducing reading later and diagnosing learning problems earlier.
In this State the far-sighted are struggling against a Victorian attitude that all children should learn in the same way at the same rate. Since many children with "special needs" haven't yet been defined as such because waiting lists for assessment are so long, the Government is faced with a potential explosion in special needs children. How do you stop this?
You claim that parents are asking too much. You alter perceptions by claiming that 12 per cent of children are receiving special needs services when only 3 per cent deserve them. As the National Children's Alliance has pointed out, artificial budgets use artificial statistics to produce artificial levels of needs, so that everything looks good on paper.