It is now almost 30 years since a woman wrote a letter to the South-Eastern Health Board pleading with it to investigate an allegation of the sexual abuse of her intellectually disabled daughter a decade previously.
The girl had just disclosed to her that “she was sexually molested by the husband of the woman she stayed with” for respite care.
“To say the least,” the mother wrote in March 1996, “I am extremely upset… The reason I’m writing this letter is to stop it from happening some other child. All through the summer months those people take in handicapped children for a fee of around £70... The name of them is [Mrs X], [a location in southeast]. I don’t know the full address, but I would like them to be investigated thoroughly before any more children suffer.”
[ ‘Grace’ final report finds evidence of serious neglect but not sexual or emotional abuse ]
This plea was urgent. Yet three long decades yawn between a state body being asked by a mother to “stop it from happening to any other child” and the State coming up with its final accounting of what indeed happened to another child in the same foster home, the girl known as Grace.
In the months after it received the alarming letter, the health board decided to leave her in that house, where she had by then been living for seven years.
And yet 30 years is apparently not long enough. For the huge final report of the Farrelly Commission of Inquiry into Grace’s treatment – itself a successor to an almost equally long interim report published in 2021 – gives no clear answers to the urgent questions raised all those decades ago.
What it does make abundantly clear, though, is that the State has now reached a crisis of irresponsibility that resonates far beyond the particulars of Grace’s grim story. It tells us definitively that our democracy has a black hole where accountability ought to be. Its mechanisms for establishing urgent truths are so clogged up as to be unworkable.
What it says at enormous length is it is almost impossible to say anything with any certainty. It is a mass of detail enveloped in a great cloud of unknowing
Grace is surely the most reported-on person in the official records of our democracy: the two Farrelly Commission reports follow two reports commissioned by the HSE and published in 2017 and extensive Public Accounts Committee hearings in 2016. If any story in the history of the State should be fully known, it is hers.
Yet what do we know at the end of it all – which is to say after an investigation that took an astonishing eight years to complete and cost €13.6 million? Less than at the beginning.
The final Farrelly report is an exercise, not in adding to the sum of public knowledge but in subtracting from it. It is voluminous without being luminous.
What it says at enormous length is that it is almost impossible to say anything with any certainty. Without an executive summary, a timeline, an index or any deep analysis, it is a mass of detail enveloped in a great cloud of unknowing.
The report in particular struggles to answer the central question. In April 2016, the health board decided to remove Grace from her foster home on foot of deep concerns about her safety. And then, in October, it decided to leave her there. The least we need to know is why. And after all the hundreds of thousands of official words, the stark point is that we still don’t.
This failure matters for its own sake, and for Grace’s sake. But it also matters to everything else about the way the State works. Or rather doesn’t work. Ireland will never function properly until people with power are accountable for how they use it.
The experience of the last decade – and of the Celtic Tiger era before it – is that of abundant public resources and grossly inadequate public delivery. There is a wide consensus on what needs to be done and we have the money to do it. What we don’t have are clear responsibilities for delivery and real consequences for failure.
The Farrelly report is an exercise in the inconsequential. Grace’s case is highly unusual in that such exhaustive attention has been given to the awful treatment of one vulnerable individual.
But Grace was one of 48 children sent to the same foster home – and the conclusion of the Farrelly report is essentially that there is no real mechanism to investigate what happened to the other 47. So even in the narrowest of terms, there is an abandonment of any real attempt at accountability.
It would be a relief to think that the disappearance of files is the result of a cover-up, which would at least show some competence
But beyond that narrow scope, there is an appalling failure of the most basic principles of public administration. One of the reasons why the Farrelly report ends up being so vague is that vital documentation is simply missing.
In relation to crucial meetings where Grace’s case was being discussed “the HSE has informed the commission that files/records of notification meetings have not been kept/retained by the HSE and therefore were not available to disclose to the Commission”.
Farcically, the commission was in some cases unable not just to get hold of records but to establish whether or not these actually existed: “The Commission cannot therefore establish whether there were files on topics such as foster care held in the programme manager’s office in 1996″.
After Tusla was established, many of the relevant health board records should have gone there, “however, neither the HSE nor Tusla could establish whether any such files had been transferred to Tusla”.
This is, apart from anything else, a flagrant breach of the law – public records must be maintained and archived.
It would actually be a relief to think that the disappearance of these files is the result of a conspiratorial cover-up, which would at least show some competence. Instead, this looks much more like systemic maladministration – for which no one will be held responsible.
This 30-year debacle should finally bring home to us the reality that official accountability does not exist. Unless and until the Government faces this bleak reality, we will remain, in the worst possible sense, in the State of Grace.
