Launch of National Standards for the Welfare and Protection of Children

Thank you for inviting me here today to launch the National Standards for the Welfare and Protection of Children.

I would like to congratulate HIQA and everyone involved in the development of these National Standards for the Welfare and Protection of Children.

This Government wanted to make absolutely clear its commitment to children. We have for the first time ever, a full Cabinet Minister with responsibility for Children. We have a Department of Children and Youth Affairs. The Minister is well on the way to establishing the Child and Family Support Agency. She is consulting on a new Policy Framework for Children and Young People.

These are opportunities to redefine our commitment to children and young people and to prioritise, across Government, the most important actions to assist them in achieving their potential.

We will have a referendum to strengthen children’s rights under the constitution.

The well being of children is a priority for this Government and will remain so.

It is critical that services for vulnerable children are of a high standard and are focussed on the safety and welfare of the child. We need to make sure that the evidence of good practice in child protection is applied uniformly. These standards are a key part of that.

They set out clearly what is expected of HSE mangers and social workers in providing a child protection service.

They will be a critical aspect of the external quality assurance infrastructure and support continuous improvements for children’s services into the future. They will enable a national picture of current practice, will show where services are performing well and will highlight areas for improvement. I welcome that.

The new Child and Family Support Agency will have direct responsibility for a wide range of critical core services. It will also be charged with the development and management of integrated work with child and family services outside the Agency. It is clear that a fully streamlined, nationally-led series of processes and procedures for referral, assessment, case management and service provision will be critical to achieve the changes required.

These processes must have at their heart the best interests of children. They must be centred around the individual child and responsive to the unique needs of some children.

The new Agency must also be an organisation that embeds the voice and views of children and their families in the way they plan and deliver services. It will take over the existing change programme for child welfare and protection services which is being overseen by the HSE’s National Director, Mr Gordon Jeyes.

The kind of issues which emerge again and again in reports regarding system failures are the same:-

Poor co-ordination between services;

Poor flows of information;

Limited access to specialist assessment and therapeutic services;

Limited integrated working for children and families with complex needs; and

equitable provision of staffing resources.

The establishment of a new Child and Family Support Agency offers a critical opportunity to re-cast and re-organise the way in which we think about and deliver child and family services.

As I said the Government is committed to holding a referendum to strengthen children’s rights in the Constitution. We aim to include children expressly by giving recognition to the views of the child, and to support the best possible arrangements for the care and protection of children.

In bringing forward an amendment we are committed to ensuring that there is no dilution of the equally important concepts of the duties of parents and the core position in Irish society of the family unit. Supporting families and protecting children are synonymous. This understanding runs through our reform of child and families services, our legislative agenda and this constitutional amendment.

We need to support families and protect children. We need to be sure that when we move to help children and families, that their life chances are improved by that decision. Child protection remains a high priority on our agenda and my Government will not fail in that duty.