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HSE believes 200 children died in care
23 May 2010 By Susan Mitchell
The Health Service Executive now believes that approximately 200 children have died in state care in the last ten years.
The figures are emerging as part of a nationwide probe and are ten times greater than the previously admitted number of deaths - the HSE had said that 23 children had died in care.
The HSE has been auditing its own files following the controversy that emerged after the publishing of a report into the death of teenager Tracey Fay.
A senior figure in the HSE told The Sunday Business Post that it still did not know the precise number of children that had died while in care, but it was feared that the true tally could be in the order of 200.
Jillian van Turnhout of the Children’s Rights Alliance, said she was ‘‘deeply saddened’’ to hear the number may be that high.
Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, has conceded that the HSE’s figure of 23 deaths may have been an underestimate. He asked the HSE to validate its figures in March and to check whether there were other cases that should have been investigated.
A spokesman for Andrews said the Minister had yet to be given a definitive figure. He expressed concern about the delay.
The deaths of children in care has been the focus of intense scrutiny since Fine Gael’s spokesman on children, Alan Shatter, used Dáil privilege to publish a draft report into the death of teenage mother-of-two Tracey Fay in 2002. In the wake of the controversy over that report and the HSE’s refusal to publish other reports into the deaths of children in its care, Andrews established an independent group to examine the deaths of children in care.
The minister appointed Norah Gibbons of Barnardos and solicitor Geoffrey Shannon, a child law expert, to the group. The Children’s Rights Alliance, which represents 90 voluntary bodies working with children, has welcomed the minister’s move, but said that the group should become a permanent body which automatically investigates all deaths in care.
Last Friday, the HSE confirmed it had appointed members of a review panel for serious incidents to review the death of Daniel McAnaspie, who was murdered while in the care of the state. The 17year-old went missing in February and his body was found last week.
There are more than 5,000 children in the care of the state at present.
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