David Foley was just 14 when he walked into Pearse St Garda station in Dublin on his own. Things were rough at home, he said, and he wanted to be admitted into the care system.
He didn’t look ready for the rough and tumble world of life on the streets. He had his schoolbag with him and asked whether he had to do his homework that night.
David’s needs were simple enough: he needed family support work, a negotiated return home or maybe a care placement in his community. None of it happened fast enough.
Instead, as two community areas disagreed over who was responsible for him, he ended up in an emergency care hostel, known as the “out-of-hours” or crisis intervention service.
It’s a notoriously dangerous environment. Many teenagers end up mixing with older, more streetwise homeless people. With its brutish sub-culture of begging, mugging and drug-dealing, it was a toxic environment for a young and naive teen.
The speed of David’s downward spiral into a world of drugs and crime during his first few months in the out-of-hours service was startling. School was out of the question once other kids on the street told him he could pick up a social welfare cheque if he didn’t attend.
His life became a blur of drinking during the day, getting high, shoplifting or stealing mobile phones. He started failing to keep appointments with social workers, many of whom went to huge efforts to help him. David tried to get to grips with life, but it seemed he was fighting a losing battle. Drugs took over. He overdosed twice.
He was found dead on a flat off Blackhall Place in Dublin’s north inner city on Saturday, September 10th, 2005. It was almost three years to the day after he entered the care system as an innocent 14 year old.
Dysfunctional
David’s death at the time didn’t make newspaper headlines or prompt any State inquiry into the handling of his case.
His life slipped quietly away, in much the same way that he slipped through the cracks of a chaotic and largely dysfunctional child-protection service.
In the absence of powerful advocates who were willing or able to speak out on his behalf, David’s voice – and that of other vulnerable children – simply wasn’t heard.
It took three years for his story to begin to emerge in public.
Health and legal professionals who were concerned over how his care needs were handled spoke anonymously to The Irish Times .
They included social workers, who were trying their best to provide support against the backdrop of an under-funded and chaotic system.
The Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan, had also been calling for the establishment of a body to review child deaths after her office became aware of young people, such as David, who died in State care where no independent review took place or key questions remained unanswered about the circumstances of the deaths.
After his story was published in the newspaper, other disturbing accounts of loss and neglect began to emerge. A pattern quickly became clear: these were vulnerable young people from often poor or chaotic family backgrounds who were admitted into care but were never provided with the kind of structured and supportive environment they needed.
As troubling evidence over the deaths of other teens in care began to tumble out into the open, opposition leaders began to ask questions.
Government ministers scrambled for answers. Social services were ordered to publish any internal reviews.
In May 2010, shortly after a review of David Foley’s case was finally published, the then minister for health and children, Mary Harney, said she was confident the number of such deaths in the care of the Health Service Executive was 23.
The next day, the HSE itself said the number was 37. Later the same month – when all children in contact with State services were included – the number rose to 188. In the end, the figure turned out to be 196 deaths over a 10-year period.
The State could tell anyone who asked, for example, the exact number of animals on Irish farms. But it couldn’t keep track of children who died in its care. The State, it seemed, had put more time, effort, and money into tracing farmyard animals than it did into tracing lost children.
Indifference
So, why was there such indifference? Why didn't authorities act sooner in addressing these failures? Why was it that these dead children weren't counted – and, literally, didn't count?
It’s clear that many of these young people simply didn’t have a voice. They were typically living in a hidden world of families on the end of society, on the edge of the health system or, in some extreme circumstances, on the edge of life.
Inequality and grinding poverty also played a role. These were, for the most part, children from some of the poorest communities. Their families often didn’t vote, didn’t have money and didn’t have any real say in the running of the country. Few people, then – including the media and politicians – were interested in their tangled and often complex stories.
There was also a sense that social services simply weren’t important. While acute hospitals dominated political debate, knotty issues linked to child protection – poverty, social exclusion, drug addiction – were considered by authorities as fringe issues of little real relevance to wider society. That helps explain why social services were rarely, if ever, discussed at board level at the HSE.
Despite what we like to tell ourselves – that children are our most important asset – issues relating to young people have traditionally been among the most neglected by our authorities.
It helps explain why thousands of children with developmental delays or behavioural problems are waiting more than a year to see specialists; or why hundreds of children with condition such as autism struggle to get the resources that are crucial to helping them reach their full potential; or why young people with mental health problems continue to be admitted to wards for adults even though such measures are highly inappropriate.
Failures
If there was any positive to be drawn from the rubble of David's tragic life and those of other troubled teens, it's that the sheer scale of care failures finally forced authorities to sit up and confront issues which were lingering in the shadows for years.
In 2012, a report by the Independent Child Death Review Group shone a detailed light on this tragic and dark corner of Irish life. The report detailed a catalogue of appalling suffering through neglect, abuse, indifference and incompetence.
While values such as voice of the child and children’s rights were often regarded as woolly or abstract concepts, the stories of these young people’s lives put a very human face on the dire consequences of failing to cherish all the children of the nation equally.
Their stories also showed the considerable power of advocacy: how campaigning on behalf of children can work and how the media, along with watchdog bodies such as the Ombudsman for Children’s Office and those in power, can effect real and lasting change.
It is often slow-burning, frustrating work. But when a fuse is lit and issues become politicised, the establishment has little choice but to confront failure.
Arguably, many of the reforms – a new stand-alone agency for child and family services, ring-fenced funding for child protection services and the first full Cabinet Minister for Children – were hastened, if not prompted, by the harrowing story of David and others.
In 2012, there was finally – more than two decades after it was first proposed – a referendum to strengthen children’s rights. The change in the wording of the Constitution holds the promise that, in a modest but significant way, children will be treated equally in the eyes of the law, that their best interests will be the primary considerations in court cases concerning them and that their voice will he heard.
The invisibility of children resulted in tens of thousands of poor, illegitimate, abused young people being forced to endure the brutalising experience of industrial schools.
The same legacy of indifference was to blame years later for a new generation of vulnerable children slipping through the cracks of the State’s child-protection system.
Real work now under way to build better child-protection and children’s-rights services is only beginning.
However, children’s advocates and campaigners will doubtless have a vital role in ensuring it is followed through and that a new generation of children is not failed again.
