The Daniel McAnaspies and Tracey Fays didn't matter when we had the money. Let's stop pretending that they matter when we don't, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
WHO CARES whether it’s 23 children who have died in the care of the State or 37 or 200?
Who cares how many Daniel McAnaspies are out there now, illiterate, vulnerable, drifting towards one form of oblivion or another? Of course all of this stuff is terrible and of course it’s a disgrace to our society. But there’s really no point in upsetting ourselves about it.
Anyone who wants a good cry should rent a three-hankie movie. It will be just as effective, and a lot cheaper, than going through the motions of pretending that we, collectively, have the slightest intention of eliminating the conditions in which children die, or are sexually exploited or just grow up without the basic requirements for happiness and self-respect.
There is one incontrovertible truth in this society – money. So consider two sums of money. Last Friday it emerged, almost casually, that the State has put €100 million into the Educational Building Society and intends to put in a further €775 million. There was no debate about this, no cost/benefit analysis, no parliamentary oversight. Sure, €875 million isn’t even a billion and billions are the only currency we recognise nowadays.
So here’s another figure: €15 million. It is the sum total of State funds allocated this year to the implementation of the Ryan commission’s recommendations on the protection of vulnerable children. It will, in theory at least, pay for the employment of an extra 200 social workers to provide a basic out-of-hours service for children at risk. Overall, the Government is committed to spending €25 million on carrying out the Ryan implementation plan. That’s one thirty-fifth of what was pledged to EBS on Friday.
So let’s be honest about this – our collective capacity for outrage at the treatment of children is extremely limited and very hard to sustain. We know, for example, that 47 children who arrived in Ireland as “unaccompanied minors” went missing from the care of the HSE last year. Since 2000, a total of 501 such children have gone missing and just 67 have been traced.
Or consider another stark figure. Last year, 155 children were admitted to adult psychiatric units because there were no other facilities available for them. This barbaric practice would have us up in arms if we learned about it in a TV documentary about Albania or Iran. Or here’s another figure: between 800 and 1,000 kids every year don’t even make it from primary school to secondary school. But such things barely flit across our collective consciousness.
Why not? Because if we were to take them seriously, we would have to spend money to do something about them. If we were to sustain our sense of shock and sorrow when another kid dies in State care or gets placed in an adult psychiatric ward or disappears into a brothel or drifts into homelessness, drug abuse and prison, we would have to pay a price. Giving kids a chance is an expensive undertaking. It is a labour-intensive and long-term business. Some improvements in services could undoubtedly be achieved by better management or more co-ordination. But the hard reality is that services are chaotic because we don’t spend enough on them.
And this is not just true of crisis childcare. We know that one of the key things that gives kids from difficult backgrounds a decent chance in life is early childhood education. But we won’t spend the money on it. We give it 0.2 per cent of GDP, compared to the EU average of 0.5 per cent.
And conversely, when money has to be saved, kids are always in the front line. Cuts in welfare payments, in educational supports and in health provision have been disproportionately aimed at children. Having failed in its stated aims of eliminating child poverty during the boom years, the Government is now knowingly increasing it. The cuts in payments to one-parent families slipped through on Friday by Éamon Ó Cuív, for example, will have a direct impact on children in their teenage years.
The reality is that, in order to protect the most vulnerable children and to give those in poor families a decent chance, we would have to expand the State. We would have to employ more social workers, develop more sheltered accommodation, invest more in early education and support families who are struggling. But that in turn would have profound implications for the direction of Government policy. It would make it impossible to find the resources for what has been identified as the national priority – money for institutions like EBS.
We are fooling ourselves if we think that anything beyond basic crisis management is on the cards for children at risk – not just this year or next year but for the next 10 years. The decisions have been made, the priorities identified. We know where the very limited resources this State can mobilise will be going, and it’s not towards the Daniel McAnaspies and Tracey Fays of this world.
They didn’t matter when we had the money. Let’s stop pretending that they matter when we don’t.