Adjusting ‘our notions of the nature of the State’: A political reading of Ireland’s child protection crisis

Abstract

The Republic of Ireland was the first country in the eurozone to adopt a neoliberal infused ‘austerity budget’, and the ill-judged state bailing out of a number of reckless banks and associated financial institutions is costing billions of euros. In late 2010, as the crisis deepened, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank provided a ‘bailout’ package that resulted in further punitive public spending cuts and the eradication of national sovereignty. This paper maintains that the present crisis is more than a mere economic crisis, but can be viewed as a series of interlinked ‘conjunctures’. Tracing the connection between the historical and the contemporary, the first part of the discussion will explore six thematic components relating to the structuring of the Irish state. These are identified as: a ‘class rule state’; an ‘authoritarian state’; a ‘confining state’; a ‘censoring state’; a ‘discriminatory state’; and a ‘state within the state’. These six dimensions provide a contextual underpinning for the second part of the paper, which focuses on the crisis in child welfare and child protection services and dwells on the shambolic performance of the Health Service Executive (HSE), deficits in the ‘care’ system and the HSE failure to furnish reliable data on the deaths of children in contact with social workers.

Keywords

hexagonal state Ryan Report Health Services Executive child deaths

Introduction

The economic crisis that has engulfed the Republic of Ireland is inseparable from a wider international crisis (Callinicos, 2010). However, the response by the Irish government was to prove particularly disastrous.

When Lehman Brothers hit the wall in September 2008, the storm broke. Brian Cowen’s panicked – and deeply compromised – government offered to guarantee the full liabilities of Irish-owned financial institutions, exposing its citizens to a potential wallop several times larger than the nation’s annual GDP. Soon afterwards, the Fianna Fáil-led administration moved to nationalize Anglo Irish, the third-largest bank in the state, and shore up its two main competitors with huge cash injections. (Finn, 2011a: 11; see also Allen, 2009; Lewis, 2011)

The Republic was also the first country in the eurozone to adopt a neoliberal infused ‘austerity’ budget. In late 2010, as the crisis deepened, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) provided a ‘bailout’ package that resulted in further punitive public spending cuts and a dilution – some would argue eradication – of national sovereignty (McArthur, 2011). A budget in December 2010, the fourth in little over two years, cut even deeper into public spending (Barnardos, 2010). Following the ‘austerity’ budgets, the ‘total fiscal tightening up’ now stands at nearly 20 per cent of GDP, more than double the Tory-led Coalition cuts in Britain’ (Burke, 2011: 140). What is more, in a stark ‘reprise of the colonial relationship … the major holder of Irish government debt are the British banks, with state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland at the front of the queue’ (Burke, 2011: 141).

Following a general election in February 2011, a government headed by Fine Gael, with the Labour Party as coalition partner, was formed, but there is no indication that the crisis is to end or that this administration is intent on embarking on a new, more socially and economically benign course (Kelly, 2011). However, the current crisis is far more than a mere economic crisis and may be conceived as a series of interlinked ‘conjunctures’. Located within a broadly Gramscian framework, the notion of ‘conjuncture’ refers to the emergence of social, political and economic and ideological contradictions at a particular historical moment. Here, different ‘levels of society, the economy, politics, ideology, common sense, etc, come together or “fuse”’ (Hall, in Hall and Massey, 2010: 59). Thus, a ‘conjuncture’ is a ‘critical turning point or rupture in a political structure, primarily signifying a crisis in class relations’ (Rustin, 2009: 18). Such a multifaceted crisis in the present order represents a potential opportunity to construct a new hegemonic settlement, which may be socially progressive or retrogressive depending on the political bloc that emerges as dominant.

This discussion is, therefore a modest attempt to analyse the state at this conjuncture. It is acknowledged that the state in Ireland is similar to those in other jurisdictions in that it is a fluid, dynamic formation whose components shift over time. Furthermore, the discussion will not seek to supplant or disrupt some of the other models of the state which have evolved in recent years: for example, the notion that the state in Ireland can be viewed as a ‘competition state’ (Kirkby and Murphy, 2011). It is understood that the state in the Republic is a neoliberal state and its core function is to furnish an ‘apparatus whose fundamental mission [is to] facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital’ (Harvey, 2005: see also Allen, 2007). Following the analysis of David Harvey, it is also recognised that here the ‘state-finance nexus’ fulfils a key role, confounding the ‘analytic tendency to see state and capital as clearly separable from each other’ (Harvey, 2010: 48). Central to this model are dynamic ‘structures of governance’ where the ‘state management of capital creation and monetary flows becomes integral to, rather than separable from, the circulation of capital. The reverse relation holds as taxes or borrowings flow into the coffers of the state as state functions also become monetarised, commodified and ultimately privatised’ (Harvey, 2010: 48). The ‘state-finance nexus’ functions, therefore, as ‘the “central nervous system” for capital accumulation’ (Harvey, 2010: 54). However, each state possesses its own ‘state-finance nexus’ which becomes the focus of struggle for ‘defining some sort of rough consensus as to how social life shall be regulated’ (Harvey, 2010: 63). In the Republic, ‘social partnership’ provided the key institutional mechanism for this form of regulation until the commencement of the recession (Allen, 1999). Beyond the nation-state constellation, there is also a global architecture which provides ‘an international version of the state-finance nexus’ (Harvey, 2010: 51): hence the operation of the World Bank, the ECB, the IMF, OECD, and the G20. Indeed, as mentioned, the ECB and IMF have been particularly important in their interventions in Ireland.

Whilst building on this analysis, the argument that follows maintains that the ‘state-finance nexus’ is a somewhat insufficient model to entirely account for the complexity of the Irish dimension. The Irish state can be interpreted as an integrated formation containing at least six separate, interlocking and shifting components. In both an historical and contemporary sense, these will be identified and articulated as: a class rule state; an authoritarian state; a confining state; a censoring state; a discriminatory state and containing a state within a state. This mapping of the hexagonal state provides a prism to examine a particular facet of the conjunctional crisis: the disarray within child and child-protection services in the Republic.

In the early years of the 21st century, discussion on child abuse has mostly focused on that perpetrated by priests and members of religious orders (Murphy et al., 2005; Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009; Commission of Investigation, 2009; Commission of Investigation, 2010).¹ Here, political, media and popular discourses have, not without reason, focused on the issue of clerical abuse, but this perspective risks producing a highly partial, incomplete interpretation of events (Garrett, forthcoming; Keenan, 2012). Moreover, the contemporary social-work literature in Ireland also tends to be rather narrow in its focus and fails to incorporate a more expansive and political reading of the crisis. Nevertheless, as the Irish Times maintained, in its comments on the Ryan Report on abuse in Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009), there needs to be an ‘adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children’ (‘Editorial: The savage reality of our darkest days’, Irish Times, 21 May 2009: 19, emphasis added). The paper also seeks, therefore, to respond to the task the Irish Times – perhaps an unlikely prompter – has set. In seeking to do this, the discussion will dwell on the shambolic performance of the Health Service Executive (HSE), deficits in the ‘care’ system and the HSE’s failure to furnish reliable data on the deaths of children in contact with social workers.²

Mapping the hexagonal state

A class rule state

In 1914, James Connolly (1973: 275) predicted that partition was likely to result in a ‘carnival of reaction’ in both the north and south on the island of Ireland. Following the partition of the country, each of the separate jurisdictions was to become culturally repressive under different, dominant religious traditions. Moreover, ‘the political and economic power of the large and middling farmers who have been described as the “nation building class”’ in the early years of the Irish Free State (1922-37) was to prove crucial. The nation-state they built … largely conformed to their interests and ideology: conservative, principally agricultural and dominated by the most conservative type of Catholicism imaginable’ (Lloyd, 1999: 103; see also Coquelin, 2005).

Within the field of child welfare, there were countervailing and oppositional tendencies campaigning for more progressive policies. For example, the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Women Social Workers established in 1937 and, over the last twenty years, the various child abuse ‘survivors’ groups. However, the direction of policy and practice has often rendered such groups marginal. In recent years, a largely compliant and politically compromised trade union leadership has hindered the potential radicalism of the labour movement, the main source of a more encompassing, alternative politics. The ‘social partnership’ approach has now been ditched by the government (Allen, 1999), but the upper echelons in the union bureaucracies have mostly ‘resisted acknowledging this and its stop–start mobilizations, intended to secure a return to the bargaining table, have been ignored by the government. Every time a march has been called – most recently in the immediate wake of the EU-IMF deal – there has been a very healthy turn-out, followed by months of inactivity’ (Finn, 2011a: 35).

Since the 1930s and into the current economic crisis, Fianna Fáil tended to form, along with coalition parties, government administrations. The Republic’s ‘electoral hegemon’, aptly described as ‘the most important secular institution in the modern Irish state’ (Finn, 2011a: 13-14), it has favoured dominant economic interests whilst skillfully orchestrating a populist/clientist politics to combat potentially counter-hegemonic forces. Indeed, McNally (2009: 88) refers to the ‘remarkable capacity’ of the party to ‘adapt and rejuvenate its equilibrium to the historically changing arena of Irish politics’. However, as mentioned, this dominance ended with the general election in February 2011 (Finn, 2011b). Fianna Fáil’s ‘unflinching commitment to protect a thoroughly corrupt banking system and its ruthless determination to load the burden of the crisis onto the lower end of the social scale’ resulted in its electoral base being decimated (Finn, 2011a: 13-14). In Dublin, it was left with only one out of the capital’s forty-seven seats in the Dáil.

The state has been consistently neglectful toward the economically and socially marginalised. Even at the peak of the boom and during the years of ‘partnership’, the Republic:

had little reason to boast about its social performance. It ranked second-to-bottom in the OECD league tables for poverty and inequality; only the US fared worse. Inequality increased during the period of highest economic growth, with the number of households earning below 50 per cent of the average income rising from 18 per cent in 1994 to 24 per cent in 2001. Other benchmarks shifted in the opposite direction: government expenditure on social protection as a proportion of GDP stood at 20 per cent in 1993, but had fallen to 14 per cent by 2000 – barely half the EU’s average. (Finn, 2011a: 12)

It would also now be entirely erroneous to assume that the ECB and IMF have ‘pushed the Dublin government down a path it would rather not tread’, given that ‘their suggestions have been accepted with something that closely resembles glee’ (Finn, 2011a: 13). Economic elites have been keen to ‘take on’ the public sector unions for some years and are now using the crisis to pursue a ruthless form of class politics (see also Klein, 2007). Thus, it is the Republic’s poorest who are facing the most severe cuts. 16.3 percent of children in Ireland live in poverty, well above the OECD average of 12.7 percent (‘More Irish children live in poverty than OECD average’, Irish Times, 19 April 2011: 3). Despite this, punitive budget cuts in 2009 represented a €31 drop in the weekly household budget for a family of four wholly reliant on social welfare. In the same budget, a lone parent with two children became poorer by €21.52 per week (Barnardos, 2010).

An authoritarian state

The Ryan Report commented on ‘the culture of obeying orders without question’ within Industrial Schools institutions where abuse took place (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009, vol. 2: 80), yet a similar ambiance can be identified in other spheres of life within the Republic.

An authoritarian ethos was attached to an array of segregation and confinement strategies and, already by 1924, there were more children in Industrial Schools in the Free State than there were in all of the Industrial Schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. In addition, a grid of incarcerating institutions existed to contain what Bauman (2004: 146) now critically labels ‘social waste’: those perceived as ‘out of place’, ‘deviant’, or ambiguously ‘troublesome’. A plethora of institutions were created for ‘juvenile delinquents’, the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘mentally handicapped’ (see also O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007).

These emergent domains were frequently reshaped post-colonial institutions, despite occasional attempts to erase ‘foreign’ approaches to the poor and socially marginalised (Sweeney, 2010). In clerical and political discourses, a particular fixation existed with how to regulate ‘unmarried mothers’ (Glynn, 1921; MacInerny, 1922, ‘Sagart’, 1922; see also Garrett, 2000a; 2000b). Symbolically, the first Mother and Baby Home established for the ‘reform’ of ‘first time’ ‘unmarried mothers’ and their babies was established by the Order of the Sacred Heart in County Cork, in 1922, the year in which the Irish Free State was formed. This institution, Bessborough, provided a prototype for other envisaged ‘services’. Often managed by the Church, these various establishments were interconnected. For example, children of ‘unmarried mothers’ could easily find themselves in Industrial Schools (Arnold, 2009: see also Smith, 2007). In addition, the threat of removal to a more fearsome and coercive institution would be likely to impact on the behaviour of rebellious or recalcitrant residents and blunt dissent.

Shifting context, the ‘independent’ – and largely politically tame – Nyberg Report, purportedly examining the cause of the Irish banking crisis, has detected the pervasive authoritarian atmosphere that helped to silence critical perspectives at odds with the ‘official’ and accepted opinions, within the banking sector and beyond: ‘Domestic doubters were few, late and usually low-key, possibly because it was thought that expressing contrarian views risked sanction’ (Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, 2011: viii). For Nyberg and his colleagues, a ‘main lesson is the need to make sure, both in private and public institutions, that there exist both fora and incentives for leadership and staff to openly discuss and challenge strategies and their implementation. It must become respectable and welcome to express professionally argued contrarian views’ (Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, 2011: ix-x).

A confining state

In present day Ireland, prisons are bulging and prison chaplains have observed a ‘growing disregard for the dignity of the human person and a worrying erosion of compassion’. Conditions are reported to be ‘an insult to the dignity of any human being and an affront to the basic tenets of decency’ (Irish Prison Chaplains: 10). Confined in stultifying environments, with insufficient rehabilitative possibilities, the predicament of today’s prisoners is, in fact, disquietingly similar to that of detainees in Industrial Schools:

We feel that the situation within the prison system is now so bad that we have no option but to challenge the prevailing culture, a culture of conformity which resists any criticism or challenge, is apparently unable to hear any alternative views and is unwilling to listen to the opinions or suggestions of those who do not conform to the dominant way of thinking that exists within the management structure. (Irish Prison Chaplains, 2010: 10-11)

In the much-criticised St. Patrick’s Institution, the way prisoners (aged 16 to 21) are ‘managed’ raises particular concerns. This is the state’s largest facility for young offenders, and national and international bodies have repeatedly condemned deplorable conditions over the past 25 years. This is not only because the detention of young people under 18 is in direct contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids the imprisonment or detention of children with adults, it is also because the Ombudsman for Children is explicitly prohibited from investigating complaints or allegations by the young people located there. Like the inmates of Industrial Schools in the past, ‘young people detained in St. Patrick’s Institution are not allowed to wear their own clothes (unlike every other prisoner in every other prison)’ (Irish Prison Chaplains, 2010: 19). More generally, as prison chaplains maintain, ‘St. Patrick’s Institution is a “warehouse” for young people, many of whom were broken by … childhood experiences. By entering into a harsh and punitive system, they are further broken down. It is a demoralising, destructive and dehumanising experience, with few redeeming features’ (Irish Prison Chaplains, 2010: 20; see also Holohan, 2011).

A censoring state

The Ryan Report referred to the flow of knowledge on the abuses taking place within the Industrial Schools, but this information was suppressed. The ‘corrosive culture of secrecy’ (Byrne, 2009a: 13) was also detectable in the treatment of the survivors of abuse and the so-called ‘gagging clauses’ imposed on former residents awarded financial compensation. These prevent ‘those who receive redress from talking about their experience of the scheme or from divulging how much compensation they were awarded. While survivors can discuss publicly details of their abuse in institutions, they are rendered voiceless when it comes to their stories of redress’ (Byrne, 2009b: 13). Moreover, the penalty for breaking a confidentiality clause is a fine of €3,000 or six months in jail on summary conviction in the District Court, or €25,000 or two years in jail on indictment (Commins, 2010). Another paradigmatic example of the state’s censoring power is provided by the report on the deaths of children in Monageer in which the text was drastically redacted and a number of pages – bizarrely, including many of the report’s recommendations – were deleted (Lunny et al., 2008). The names of key officials connected to children who either died or were abused in public care are routinely omitted from subsequently published inquiry reports (see, for example, Report of a Committee of Inquiry, 1996; Gibbons, 2010). Comparable elisions are apparent in the Nyberg Report, which, despite disclosures from more than 140 key respondents, failed to identify any named individual (Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, 2011).

A discriminatory state

Women had been active both politically and militarily during the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War (Valiulis, 1994: 84-85). In 1922, women over the age of 21 were also enfranchised in the Irish Free State: a move in contrast to the position in the six counties of Northern Ireland and Britain, where women between the ages of 21-30 were not entitled to vote until 1929. Nevertheless, the period between the signing of the Treaty and the approval of the new Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, in 1937 witnessed the ‘contraction of women's public and political role’ (O’Dowd, 1987: 4). After 1922, a number of legislative measures were introduced to curtail the role of women and to ease women out of the public sphere. In 1925, the Civil Service (Amendment) Act limited women’s opportunity to enter the civil service and, two years later, the Juries Act removed women from jury service. In 1936, the Conditions of Employment Act curtailed women’s employment. Women’s reproductive rights and sexual morality also consistently featured as controversial issues throughout the period of the Irish Free State. Divorce, legalised eventually in the 1990s, was banned in 1925 (Whyte, 1971: Ch. 2). State policy regulating birth control derived from the Censorship of Publications Act 1929 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1935. These two measures banned birth control literature and the sale and importation of contraceptives. Underlying the entire censorship debate was, moreover, asserts Clancy (1990: 211) a ‘desire to extend control over aspects of women's lives in general’. The dominant construct of motherhood was finely demarcated and ‘unmarried mothers’ (somehow counterfeit or bogus mothers) were, as mentioned earlier, subjected to processes of coercion and creeping criminalisation. Women on the island of Ireland continue to be denied the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion (both within the northern and southern jurisdictions) (Oaks, 2002).

Racism is encountered in embedded and socially pervasive ways by Irish Travellers (Fanning, 2002). However, despite criticism from the UN, successive governments have refused to recognise Travellers as an ‘ethnic group’. In recent years, some migrants have also encountered racism and xenophobia (Lentin, 2007; Lentin and McVeigh, 2006; White, 2009). Prior to the recent downturn, this may have been somewhat muted because of the buoyant economy. Many sectors of the Irish economy (such as the hospital, social care, cleaning and restaurant work) remain dependent on non-Irish workers. Moreover, these workers are regarded as ‘cheap labour, easily disposable’ (Dundon et al., 2007: 502). Asylum seekers are rigidly segregated, with 52 direct provision centres established in April 2000, and almost 6,000 asylum seekers are still living in them for more than three years (see also Christie, 2006). These are privately operated establishments with contracts with the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA): residents are given 19.10 euro each week to live on and provided with a shared room and meals in ‘hotel-style’ accommodation. A person waiting for their asylum claim to be decided by the state has no right to work. Even more seriously, many unaccompanied children seeking asylum went missing from state care in the past decade. Importantly also, a 2004 amendment to the constitution provided that children born on the island of Ireland to parents who were both non-nationals would no longer have an automatic and constitutional right to Irish citizenship.

A state within the state

The position of the Roman Catholic Church within the Republic is historically significant because it was ‘primarily governance from the Church rather than the state which framed interventions with children and families’ (Skehill, 2004: 52-3). As the report into child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin observed, the Church remains not only ‘a religious organisation’, but it also continues to be ‘a human/civil instrument of control and power’ (Commission of Investigation, 2009: 14). Despite never having been an omnipotent presence, the Church has undoubtedly been a key component in the hegemonic ensemble responsible for governing Irish society: recognising that Harvey’s focus has never been on Ireland, the institution cannot be adequately catered for in his ‘state-finance nexus’ paradigm.

Alluding to the changing relationship between the Vatican and the state, the Irish Times has recently claimed the ‘days of genuflection are over’ (‘Editorial’, Irish Times, 13 December 2010: 13). However, WikiLeaks disclosures revealed how subservient the government can still be, notably in failing to press the Vatican to co-operate with the inquiry into clerical sexual abuse in the Dublin diocese (Commission of Investigation, 2009).

Following the publication of the Cloyne Report (Commission of Investigation, 2011), the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny (2011) made a statement in Dáil Éireann in which he castigated the Vatican. It included the following:

The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic … as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism … that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict's ‘ear of the heart’ … the Vatican's reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.

The statement, although perhaps seeming to substantiate the idea that a new relationship is now being forged in terms of the state’s relationship with the Vatican, can also be perceived as the coalition government opportunistically and cynically seeking to achieve a sense of legitimacy, and to be providing a moral compass in a period in which it is also responsible for introducing salary and welfare cuts. The Church also remains a significant ideological and material power within the Republic. Its power may be ‘slowly and subtly eroding, but it is still strong. No one is afraid of priests anymore … but they still appoint the teachers and run the schools’ (Toibin, 2005: 6). For example, although the new government appears to be committed to changing the situation, the Church currently ‘controls 2,899 of the 3,282 primary schools in the state, catering for 92 per cent of pupils’ (O’Toole, 2009: 3). What this underlines is the ‘vulnerability of a State which owns and controls so little of its vital social infrastructure’ (Raftery, 2009: 16). The Church has also been historically resistant to child-centred education, and frequently stymied the development of public health systems. More recently, the fields of Church and the corporate or business sector have become more porous (Allen, 2007). This has been reflected in suggestions that a way of rectifying previous failures is for the Church to adopt a business and managerial approach to internal governance (see, for example, Murphy et al., 2005).

Tracing the connection between the historical and the contemporary, the first part of the discussion has sought to explore six thematic components relating to the structuring of the Irish state. In the second part, the paper focuses on the crisis in child welfare and child protection services. Here the aim will not be to methodically attach facets of this crisis to each of the six dimensions. Rather, the six dimensions provide a contextual underpinning for the evident problems in the child welfare and child protection sector which have been highlighted, particularly following the publication of the Ryan Report. What is more, children and families forming the bulk of social workers’ caseloads are frequently exposed to the six-sided state in its most tangible and harshest form.

The crisis in child welfare and associated spheres

Days after the publication of the Ryan Report, in May 2009, a coalition of seven charities and pressure groups working with children and survivors of abuse issued a press release stating ‘Never Again’ (Barnardos et al., 2009; see also Children’s Rights Alliance, 2009a; 2009b). One of the early ‘official’ responses to the Ryan Report’s twenty-one recommendations, perhaps its weakest section, emerged from the Office of the Minister of Children and Youth Affairs (2009). It spelt out how the government was to react to what the serving and reforming Catholic Archbishop of Dublin referred to as the ‘stomach-churning’ stories of abuse featured in the Report (‘Systematic, endemic abuse in State institutions laid bare’, Irish Times, 21 May 2009: 1).

Many of the commitments set out by the Minister are likely to be regarded in a somewhat cynical way because of successive Irish governments’ inclination to produce reports, or even legislation, which rarely becomes operational. Alternatively, there is considerable delay in full implementation, as occurred with the Child Care Act 1991, which only fully came into force five years later. Similarly, A Vision for Change, a blueprint for modernising mental health services, has still to be implemented. In the aftermath of Justice Ryan’s inquiries, the then ruling Fianna Fáil administration remained intent on drastically reducing the number of public-sector workers despite a pledge to increase the number of social workers. In this context, continuing staff vacancies will have a deleterious impact on the ability of childcare professionals to assist families. Despite an expansion in the profession in the past thirty years, the relative number of social workers employed remains below that in Northern Ireland (see also Gilligan, 2009; Buckley, 2010). Indeed, even prior to the present crisis, the National Social Work Qualification Board (NSWQB) referred to a ‘syndrome of permanent temporary posts’, with the field of social work being destabilised by patterns of precariousness and corrosive casualisation (NSWQB, 2006: 10).

Significantly, the Ryan Report makes the connection between the abusive practices of the past and vulnerability of a number of groups in contemporary Ireland located in sites of confinement and quasi-confinement:

While the industrial and reformatory schools with which the Commission was chiefly concerned belong to the past, there are still a great many people in institutional care within the State today. In addition to children, the State is responsible for the care of vulnerable adults, such as those with disabilities, mental health difficulties and older people … It essential that the State reviews its policies, systems, management and administration in relation to the care of vulnerable adults in the light of the lessons learned from the Commission’s Report. (Office of the Minister of Children and Youth Affairs, 2009: 23)

This statement is important because of the numbers of people involved: there ‘are approximately 9,000 adults with disabilities in residential care. In 2008 there were 1,096 patients in long-stay wards in psychiatric hospitals and a further 1,664 in full-time residential care with mental health services. Nursing homes and community hospitals care for about 23,000 older people’ (Office of the Minister of Children and Youth Affairs, 2009: 24). In addition, these numbers could, of course, be supplemented with the asylum seekers held in so-called ‘direct provision’ facilities, and children in detention.

As mentioned, the way that young prisoners are ‘managed’ in the much-criticised St. Patrick’s Institution raises serious concerns. Continuing anxieties also exist about the practice of placing children in adult psychiatric wards. An HSE code of practice, which came into effect in July 2009, states that no child under 16 years should be admitted to adult psychiatric units apart from in exceptional circumstances. However, at least 100 children under the age of 18 were admitted to adult psychiatric facilities in 2010, ‘despite a commitment by the HSE to phase out the practice’. An inspector of mental health services has ‘described the practice of admitting children to adult centres as ‘inexcusable, counter-therapeutic and almost custodial in that clinical supervision is provided by teams unqualified in child and adolescent psychiatry’ (see also ‘100 children placed in adult psychiatric units’, Irish Times, 7 October 2010: 2; see also Bonnar, 2010).

The Health and Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) reported that staff in a third of the state’s residential centres had not been properly vetted, and that the children placed there were at unnecessary risk. Similarly, many foster carers have not been vetted. The HIQA has also called on the HSE to immediately cease using one of its three secure units for troubled and vulnerable young people – Ballydowd – due to concerns over the safety of child residents. This was echoed by the HIQA in subsequent reports, which expressed ‘grave concerns regarding the safety for children’ within one of the other units, Coovagh House in Limerick (Health and Information Quality Authority, 2010a; 2010b; 2010c).

The publication of the Ryan Report on child abuse in the past coincides with a manifest and more widespread contemporary crisis within child welfare and child protection services. For example, the ‘awareness’ and ‘consistent implementation’ of Children First (Department of Health and Children, 1999) – the protocol guiding arrangements for inter-professional working and the protection and welfare of children – remains ‘a continuing challenge’ (Office of the Minister for Children, 2008: v). Two key issues are significant:

the absence of consistency in the delivery of child welfare and protection services across the country and, more importantly, the absence of any standards against which delivery of services can be benchmarked and monitored … [It is] incontrovertible that there are major inconsistencies in the implementation of the Children First guidelines throughout the country. (Office of the Minister for Children, 2008: 14-15; see also Ombudsman for Children (2010)

Kemp (2008: 107) has detected a somewhat paradoxical tendency whereby the ‘more attempts are made to control and standardize practice, the more divergent practice appears to have become’. Specifically in terms of Children First, no ‘sooner had the document been launched than variations were adopted by each Health Board. Instead of standardising practice, it merely led to greater degrees of divergence and localised arrangements’ (Kemp, 2008: 107).³ A heavily censored report published in 2008 also drew attention to the lack of a national ‘emergency’ or ‘out-of-hours’ service (Lunny et al., 2008). A further report criticised Roscommon social workers for their inadequate response, over a number of years, to a family in which abuse and neglect had occurred (Gibbons, 2010). Many of these deficiencies had been already identified in previous inquiries (see, for example, Report of a Committee of Inquiry, 1996).

The Children’s Rights Alliance (2009a: 8) has condemned the ‘dysfunctional HSE care system’. Under the Child Care Act 1991 and the Child Care Regulations 1995, children in care should be allocated an ‘authorised person’ (delegated by the HSE to social workers) to carry out all regulatory functions on their behalf. However, HSE data for April 2009 revealed that ‘83.6% of children in care had an allocated social worker, while just over 16% did not … According to HSE April 2009 data, [only] 64% of children in care are reported to have a care plan’ (Office of the Minister of Children and Youth Affairs, 2009: 35). In certain localities, the problems are more serious: for example, almost half the children in foster care in Dublin North West and a third in Dublin North Central have not been allocated a social worker by the HSE, according to the HIQA. The inspection body also identified serious problems related to the management of files on foster children, which were stored in unlocked rooms and often contained incorrect names and dates of birth of children. There were ‘files missing and a number of personal items belonging to children – such as photographs, letters and baby bracelets – had simply been left to fall from files onto the floor without any accompanying identification tags’. It was revealed that the HIQA chief executive had, moreover, warned the HSE chief executive of the ‘large numbers of children in care, living with unapproved carers, who have not seen or been seen by an HSE authorised person for a considerable period’. On account of this, the HSE was ‘in breach of the Childcare (Foster Care) regulations’ (‘Many children in foster care have no social worker’, Irish Times, 10 March 2010: 7). However, subsequently – and following the audit of more than 1,000 foster care files by the HIQA – it was reported that many children in care have not been visited by an ‘authorised person’ for many years. (‘Some children in care “not seen by social workers for 10 years”’, Irish Times, 8 June 2010: 1).

These HIQA findings reveal that the HSE is unable to safeguard children in care. The failure to meet the statutory requirement to ensure that children in care are visited by a social worker at least once every six months also resonates with the disregard shown to children revealed in the Ryan Report. In this context, child protection groups have strongly criticised the slow pace with which the Ryan recommendations are being implemented (see also the website of the pressure group Saving Childhood Ryan, <www.savingchildhoodryan.ie>). Furthermore, the pledged new social worker and speech therapist posts outlined in the previous government’s post-Ryan ‘implementation plan’ have been considerably delayed (Office of the Minister of Children and Youth Affairs, 2009; see also ‘Therapist posts not filled due to funds shortage’, Irish Times, 23 February 2011: 5). Furthermore, the plan to appoint a ‘czar’ with the power to oversee the HSE’s childcare policies and – according to previous Minister for Children – with the ‘capacity to do an X-ray of the service’, hardly appears to be a meaningful response to the nature of the problems that have been identified (‘Children’s czar to be recruited abroad’, Irish Times, 10 June 2010: 12). The task of providing an ‘X-ray’ of services seems more appropriately to be the responsibility of the democratically elected member of Dáil Éireann with ministerial responsibility. However, in December 2010, the HSE announced that Gordon Jeyes, a former director of the UK’s children’s services, was appointed to this, ‘a two-year post … to lead organisational and cultural change’ (Health Services Executive, 2010). Other actions, such as the decision to dissolve the Children Act Advisory Board, suggest that any attempts to respond to defects in childcare and protection systems are likely to be, at best, highly problematic and insufficient. The new Fine Gael/Labour administration has appointed a new Minister for Children, who will have Cabinet status, but this is unlikely to have a major impact.

The deaths of children and young people in ‘care’

During 2010, the deaths of children and young people in care and the failure of the HSE to produce robust and reliable data emerged as a key issue (see Table 1). The incompetence of the HSE can be interpreted as part of a culture of inertia, secrecy and disrespect not only to the specific dead children and young people but, more expansively, for those often troubled and impoverished families in contact with social services. Indeed, the multisided Irish state is revealed in its most transparent and brutal form, in its actions and inactions, and in its failure to produce accurate information on the death of children in ‘care’ and contact with social workers.

Table 1:

Deaths of children and young people in ‘care’ reported by the media.

Kim O’Donovan (15), found dead after a suspected drugs overdose in city centre bed-and-breakfast accommodation (August 2000).

Tracey Fay (18), found dead in a disused coal bunker after injecting herself (January 2002).

Shane Hafford (16), died in an apartment in Drogheda near to the children’s home in which he had been placed (April 2003).

David Foley (17), died of an overdose three years after voluntarily seeking care from the state (September 2005).

Melissa Mahon (14), killed while she was in HSE care. A man was found guilty of her manslaughter in May 2009 (September 2006).

Michelle Bray (14), died after inhaling the contents of a deodorant can (January 2007).

William Colquhoun (18), in residential care when he died (July 2008).

Christopher O’Driscoll (17), discovered in a derelict house in Cork having died from pneumonia exacerbated by drug-taking (May 2009).

Danny Talbot (19), in the care of the HSE. Died following a suspected drugs overdose (summer 2009).

Daniel McAnaspie (17), originally from Dublin, went missing in February 2010, when in the care of the HSE, and was later found in a ditch in Co. Meath having been stabbed to death (May 2010) (see also Ingle, 2010).

In March 2010, it was reported that the HSE had not published a single report on the death of a child in state care since it was formed in 2005. Moreover, no independent child death review system was in place until that same month, when the Minister for Children established an expert group to investigate the deaths of children in ‘care’ over the last decade. This Group was then criticised by the Ombudsman for Children (OfC) because of its lack of statutory powers and independence. At this time, a senior HSE official told the Public Accounts Committee that 20 children had died in state care over the previous decade. However, the Minister for Children informed Dáil Éireann that the number was 23 (‘HSE ordered to speed up reporting of deaths of children’, Irish Times, 5 March, 2010: 1). Soon, though, reports began to emerge that suggested that the true figure was far in excess of this number.

The lumbering and secretive HSE compounded problems by refusing to hand over the relevant files to the independent panel set up by the Irish government. This prompted the Minister for Children to seek legal advice on how to deal with what was – supposedly – an executive agency of the state: the publication of the Health (Amendment) Bill 2010 was, therefore, meant to respond to the HSE’s intransigence. It was also reported that the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner (O&IC) and OfC were both finding their work hampered by the ‘excess of legalism’ in the HSE (‘HSE failure to produce records of deaths “bizarre”’, Irish Times, 28 May 2010: 7). In an unprecedented intervention, the O&IC charged the HSE with ‘ill-founded legalism matched only by a lack of common sense’ (see also O’Reilly, 2010: 13).

Revealing the inadequacy of information retrieval systems across the HSE, which had not been satisfactorily addressed during the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ period, a senior manager in the agency stated that assembling numbers on the deaths of children was difficult because it involved checking manual records and relying on the local knowledge of social workers (‘HSE to give number of child deaths in State Care’, Irish Times, 28 May 2010: 7). At length, however, the HSE announced that 37 children had died in state care in the 10 years from 1 Jan 2000 to 30 April 2010 – that is to say, a 60 per cent increase on figures it had previously provided: 18 of these deaths were attributable to what were termed ‘unnatural causes’. At the time, the Minister for Children remained critical of the HSE for having taken ten weeks to hand over the figures he requested in March. Furthermore, the HSE was still to provide information on deaths related to children ‘known to’ (or in contact with) the HSE (‘37 children died in State care in 10 years’, Irish Times, 29 May 2010: 8). It was later announced that at least 188 young people who were in care or in contact with social services have died over the past decade. This new figure was based on a wider definition of deaths to include children who were known to social services, or young people aged 18-21 who were receiving ‘after-care’ services. However, a senior HSE official said the number could rise still further if social work teams around the country found evidence of further deaths (‘Child deaths in care or in contact with services now at 188’, Irish Times, 5 June 2010: 1). Even in terms of the figures produced, it was startling that the numbers of dead children and young people had escalated from 20, to 23, to 37 to 188 in the space of a few weeks. In December 2010, it was revealed that the number of dead children had risen to 199, 11 more than was announced by the HSE in June (‘HSE revises figures for deaths of children’, Irish Times, 9 December 2010: 3).

The Republic of Ireland is not the only country encountering difficulties in maintaining a robust system of child welfare and child protection; but the way in which the problem is emerging is clearly nationally specific and needs to be located conjuncturally and in relation to other developments within the troubled jurisdiction. The dominant ‘official’ narrative maintains that a measure of ‘reform’ is urgently required. Often such ideas are heavily influenced by ‘reforms’ introduced in England during the New Labour period: for example, the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 2003) and the notion that child welfare services can be ‘transformed’ by new systems of e-working (see also Garrett, 2009). Elsewhere, there is a tendency to echo keywords derived from the discourse of ‘reform’ across the Irish Sea (see also Williams, 1983; Bennett et al., 2005). For example, it has been argued that the ‘current pressures experienced by the Health Service Executive could be addressed through partnerships with all concerned with children and families’ (Dolan, 2010: 16, emphasis added). There has also been a more recent tendency, often related to the involvement of US-based private philanthropic organisations, to focus on ‘early intervention’ in the lives of children. Clearly, such attempts to ‘reform’ a ramshackle and chaotic system of child welfare and child protection may impact in favourable ways. However, these approaches are largely inadequate because they fail to recognise how the state has functioned in the Republic of Ireland. This paper suggests that in order to better understand the evident and serious problems in child welfare and child protection, it is vital to analyse historical and contemporary state practices and the patterning of economic and social relations within a hexagonal state formation. More fundamentally, it will be impossible to truly reform the dysfunctional system of child welfare and child protection within the Republic of Ireland without an extensive and embracing political project of state transformation.

Conclusion

The Ryan Report was published at a time when there was an encompassing crisis rippling through the six dimensions of the state. Indeed, ‘one by one, the traditional pillars’ that held ‘institutional life together’ appeared to be ‘torn down’, with sources of established authority being left ‘debased’ (Byrne, 2009b: 13). Subsequently, of course, the economic situation for many has deteriorated immeasurably, and confidence in traditional sources of authority has continued to ebb. In Spring 2010, a survey of public opinion revealed that the ‘impact of the Ryan and Murphy reports could be seen in a sharp rise in the level of distrust in the Church. The number of people who did not trust the Church “at all” rose from 6 per cent in 2001 to nearly a third (32 per cent)’ in 2010. Those who trusted the Church ‘a great deal’ fell from 18 per cent in 2001 to 4 per cent. The erosion of trust in the government was almost as dramatic, with nearly half the public (44 per cent) saying they did not trust it to be honest and fair ‘at all’ compared to 30 per cent in 2004, and 9 per cent in 2001. Similarly, the number of people who did not trust the banks ‘at all’ was up from 9 per cent at the height of the boom in 2006 to 41 per cent in 2010. Those who distrusted the health service rose from 19 per cent in 2001 to 41 per cent in 2010 (‘Most people no longer trust church, Government or banks’, The Irish Times, 29 April, 2010: 3). The defeat of Fianna Fáil in the general election is a further indicator of this loss of confidence in elites and elite institutions.

Referring specifically to the international ‘financial meltdown’, Zizek (2008) maintains that the future now ‘all depends on how it will be symbolised, on what ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the general perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a “discursive” ideological competition [and consequently] the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative’. An attempt to impose an ‘ideological interpretation or story’ and to forge an acceptable ‘narrative’ was made in spring 2011 with the publication of the Nyberg Report, which had been invited by the previous Fianna Fáil administration. The Finnish financial expert gently chided a number of banks because governance had fallen ‘short of best practice’. More significantly, the Report attempted to spread the blame for the current crisis across Irish society on account of ‘a national speculative mania … centred on the property market. As in most manias, those caught up in it could believe and have trust in extraordinary things, such as unlimited real wealth from selling property to each other on credit’. Moreover, the ‘extent to which large parts of Irish society were willing to let the good times roll on until the very last minute … may have been exceptional’ (Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, 2011: iv; i). Whilst crudely disregarding the fact that many, such as those in contact with social workers discussed earlier, did not let the ‘good times roll’, this narrative of collective responsibility entirely meshes with one of the core, and duplicitous, rhetorical tropes of national elites: the idea that all must be now be prepared to ‘share the pain’ and ‘take a hit’ in terms of attacks on jobs, salaries and services.

At present, however, there are few indications of ‘ideological struggle’. In the Republic of Ireland, there are no recent ‘traditions of struggle comparable to those of Greece and Portugal to be drawn upon’ (Finn, 2011a: 35). As mentioned, the potential combativeness of the trade union movement has been undermined by the years of ‘partnership’. Now that the Labour Party is in government, the trade union leadership will be even more reluctant to organise mass mobilisations. Given this context, it is not unlikely that a much more retrogressive hegemonic settlement may evolve. If this occurs, although the Church is unlikely to perform the role it did prior to the abuse scandals, the six-sided state is likely to have its harshest components consolidated. However, along with the politically ambiguous Sinn Féin, a number of newly elected independent members of the Dáil – a handful of them members of a United Left Alliance – may provide a prompt for wider and even re-energised political opposition involving trade unionists now seeking to break free of the ‘partnership’ mindset and the beckoning decades of grim ‘austerity’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Joint Nordic Conference on Welfare and Professionalism in Turbulent Times, in Reykjavik, Iceland, 11-13 August, 2011. Valeria Ballarotti provided invaluable suggestions on all aspects of this piece.

Notes

Author biography

Paul Michael Garrett is the author of three books critically examining social work/social policy relating to children and families: Remaking Social Work with Children and Families (Routledge, 2003); Social Work with Irish Children and Families in Britain (Policy Press, 2004); and ‘Transforming’ Children’s Services? Social Work, Neoliberalism and the ‘Modern’ World (Open University/McGraw Hill, 2009). He is a member of the editorial boards of Critical Social Policy (where he edits the book reviews) and the European Journal of Social Work, and is a consulting editor for the US-based Journal of Progressive Human Services.

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