THE HEALTH Service Executive (HSE) is the state body that just can’t seem to get anything right, instead lurching from crisis to crisis. The latest debacle is the revelation that 188 children have died while in state care in the last decade.
Speaking today at the funeral of Daniel McAnaspie who was murdered while in the care of the HSE, Fr Peter McVerry said the seventeen year-old’s life was destroyed and pinned the blame firmly on the state.
McAnespie’s death was ‘the failure of a dysfunctional and under-resourced childcare system’ said McVerry, who hit out at the state bailing-out banks but not paying for enough social workers.
McVerry said another 1 200 social workers were required simply to get the service into line with that in the North.
The fact that a priest is saying the state failed in its duty to look after children is certainly rich in irony but before we get into bashing the bishops there are two points worth noting. Firstly, the fact that neither the church nor the state has looked after children properly tells us something about where is the best place for children to be raised: the family home. Secondly, throwing social workers at problems as if they have magical powers will do precisely nothing to address the real issue in Irish society: the absolute division between those with access to money, resources, connections and the services of the state and those without—whose sole experience of state services is when they are forced on them either through unemployment or unsolicited intervention.
Simplifying every problem down to one of poverty is no answer but the reality is that class (which is about more than just cash) remains a very real issue in Ireland today, more insidious than it ever was in Britain.
Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media, few people really care about the children in question. Rather, they represent an avatar for a ‘dysfunctional’ society that the well-heeled can tut-tut about. The vision of the helpless children being abused or neglected by their parents is simply the other side of the coin to dinner party horror stories of feral kids running riot.
There is no recognition in either elite or middle class circles that Ireland has always failed the children of the working class. It was working class children who were criminalised and thrown into ecclesiastical prisons. Official Ireland wanted nothing to do with them and handed them over to the Church, believing, in a patrician fashion, that it would be in the children’s best interest to be removed from their ‘feckless’ families.
Today a similar mistake is being made. The same pompous and patrician attitude hangs over the debate like an impenetrable miasma: the middle class fug of ’something-must-be-done’.
Well, yes, something indeed must be done. People must be persuaded that they have a future. A family beset by long-term unemployment and with no hope is hardly a recipe for stability but, as usual, the interventionist answer will do nothing to address generations of people being consigned to the scrap heap. Instead there will be further criminalisation and snobbery.
If approved, the proposed armies of social workers will simply descend into low income areas like a plague of busybodies acting, literally, in loco parentis and, ultimately, breaking-up families.
There are, of course, extreme cases when it is better for children to be removed from their families but it is dangerous to generalise from this. A family environment that does not fall into this category, whatever its other deficiencies, is clearly better for child than to be raised in the cold, corporate arms of the state.
And yet, popular liberal prejudice wants nothing more than to see the problem disappear from their boardwalks and boulevards.
Speaking the his Newstalk lunchtime programme, presenter Dara O’Brian made several references to ‘strung-out’ parents in areas of Dublin that listeners ‘would know’. O’Brian (lightly) grilled the HSE’s Dublin northeast regional operations director Stephen Mulvany on the agency’s record before going on to ask how to grass-up parents he felt were incapable of ‘crossing the road’. (In typical Newstalk fashion this largely content-free interview was later presented as news in its own right).
Such predictable and tedious liberal outrage is par for the course in Ireland today. Declassé tabloid rage and the conservative ramblings of the likes of Kevin Myers and John Waters are scoffed at, of course, but the insidious people-hating at the heart of Irish liberalism goes unremarked-upon. In all cases, though, from shrill tabloid exposés through Myers and Waters to the ‘right-thinking’ commentary of liberal Ireland, there is not a shred of interest in dealing with the real socio-economic issues at stake.
After all, it’s so much easier, and more emotionally satisfying, to whinge about junkie parents and feral kids and demand the state do something about ‘these people’.
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