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Frances Fitzgerald TD, Minister for Children & Youth Affairs has today said that a lack of inter-agency and multi-disciplinary working in child protection has resulted in too many children being failed.

The Minister said: “We built walls between services and we let children fall between the gaps in-between.”

The Minister was addressing the 13th ISPCAN (International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect) European Regional Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect. This major international conference is being attended by delegates from 52 countries and is being held in Dublin for the first time since 1996.

The Minister spoke of the challenges facing Ireland’s child protection services as a result of increased demands in recent years. The Minister told delegates that the number of child protection and welfare referrals had almost doubled, from 21,000 in 2006 to over 40,000 in 2012. The increase in 2012 alone was 25% up on the 2011 figure.

The Minister also spoke of the general increase in Ireland’s child population, up 13.4% since 2006, with the number of traveller children up 30.3% and the number of foreign national children up 49.5%.

The Minister said “increased demand has placed significant pressures on Ireland’s child protection services which we are working to address”.

Addressing delegates, the Minister referred to last year’s report of the Independent Child Deaths Review Group and its findings, which were repeated in many of the tragic case summaries, regarding the large number of different agencies involved in many of these young people lives. The Minister said that “up to 14 different agencies were involved in some cases. So it wasn’t that the state didn’t intervene. We did intervene. We just didn’t intervene as we should have and services didn’t work together.”

The Minister referred to the National Audit of Neglect Cases published in June which indicated that parental alcohol misuse was a factor in 62% of neglect cases; domestic violence featured in almost two thirds of the sample cases; and parental mental health issues in two thirds of the Dublin cases. The Audit also highlighted common trends relating to poor school attendance and non-attendance at medical and other specialist appointments; for example with speech and language therapists or psychologists.

However the Minister noted that “despite all the indicators which were picked-up and referred on by various agencies and professionals, this Audit found that social work services were not intervening speedily enough in neglect cases.”

The Minister further questioned why so many of the young people entering detention on foot of court referrals are, or previously have been in care. The Minister asked:“why are two separate systems failing the same set of troublesome teenagers?”

The Minister told delegates that she was challenging the services under her remit to work better together. The Minister said that there was “an absolute need for integration and collaboration in service provision; and in practical terms the challenges of inter-agency and multi-disciplinary cooperation.”

The Minister said that a key element of the response to these challenges would be the establishment, in coming months, of the new Child and Family Agency.

The Minister told delegates that “the new Agency would, for the first time, bring together child protection social workers, family support workers, education welfare officers and psychologists under one roof and into one team.”

“By getting these services working together, while protecting professional identities, we can then deliver the new models which will ensure consistency and quality with respect to case intake, risk assessment; referral to appropriate services; and case-working.”

The Minister noted that establishment of the Child & Family Agency “represents the largest and most ambitious public service reform being undertaken by this Government; involving 4,000 staff across three existing agencies and a budget of nearly €600 million. “