Madam, – I read with interest and some frustration Breda O’Brien’s piece (Opinion, July 3rd), calling for the recruitment of trained professionals by the Catholic Church in Ireland to investigate child abuse cases. I wish to remind Ms O’Brien and your readers that the statutory responsibility for investigating child abuse cases in this country rests with the Health Service Executive (HSE).
While Ms O’Brien quite rightly refers to the poor “co-ordination between the HSE and Garda and other statutory bodies, which has had serious and sometimes fatal consequences”, I fail to see how creating a parallel non-statutory system for investigating such concerns goes any way to improving our means of protecting children in this country from abuse. Surely instead of putting resources into creating yet another system for dealing with allegations of child abuse, we should be supporting our statutory services and addressing the “systemic failures” so often quoted in recent reports on this issue.
These trained professionals that Ms O’ Brien refers to are currently employed within the HSE. How does it improve the fate of children to draw these resources away from the HSE into a non-statutory system, thus diluting the impact that such professionals can have in dealing with the very complex issue of child abuse?
I welcome Ms O’Brien’s article insofar as it is time for the newspapers in this country to contribute to the real debate on child abuse: time to stop pointing the finger, to stop wallowing in the mire of blaming the church, blaming the State.
We, the public of Ireland, are the church, we are the State. It is time for us to take responsibility instead of constantly looking for others to take responsibility on our behalf. It is time for us to start thinking about how we can support the systems we do have to protect our children from being abused. – Yours, etc,