In ancient times, crocodiles were thought to weep while they were feasting on their victims. It’s unlikely the cold-blooded creatures were expressing grief but rather a triumphant cry, the equivalent in today’s parlance of “gotcha!”.
The Government benches in Dáil Éireann are knee-deep in crocodile tears these days. They’re sobbing for the children, as they cart off their free Oireachtas envelopes in a delirium of electionitis. Save the children from Sinn Féin’s wicked clutches, they wail in a banquet of condemnation. Gotcha, the Government party leaders might as well have cried as they surveyed their biggest rival imploding across the Dáil chamber and, ergo, apparently decided to bring forward the general election.
Needless to say, the main Opposition party has served itself up on a platter with its insensitive, bungling and less than truthful handling of its ex-Seanad leader Niall Ó Donnghaile’s resignation over inappropriate texts to a 16-year-old, and job references for convicted sex offender Michael McMonagle. But people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones.
In its dash to the polls, the Coalition is leaving behind a shameful legacy for the children of Ireland. One in every seven children now lives in poverty. Others languish on waiting lists for scoliosis surgery, mental health appointments or special needs classes. The most recently published figures show that 4,419 children are homeless, many moving between hotels and B&Bs. Another 5,000 immigrant children are living in direct provision, again mostly in emergency accommodation.
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Last year, 29 young people died while they were in care or aftercare or were known to Tusla. The scarcity of special care beds for children at risk is so severe that one High Court judge has warned “a tsunami [is] about to reach shore and nothing is being done”. The Oireachtas health committee was told in January that about 4,400 children were waiting for first-time appointments with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. Some schools in the country are still segregating Traveller children, a community for whom racism and exclusion have been identified as contributing to a suicide level more than six times higher than in the wider community and the majority of whose victims are aged under 30.
Shame on a Government that has presided over this catalogue of child neglect. Double-shame when it claims the high moral ground in protecting children. Ireland, we are told, is one of the world’s richest countries. Yet the Department of Children has stopped funding the Child Law Project, a court reporting service that has exposed numerous failures in the system and whose three-year contract has expired. The Minister, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman, has promised a new reporting contract but he has not explained why the tender process for it was not done before the existing one shut up shop.
In a similar vein, the Ombudsman for Children, Niall Muldoon, said in his annual report that, despite being requested by the Department of Justice to provide independent oversight of those elements of the domestic, sexual and gender-based violence strategy that affect children, funding has not been forthcoming “and therefore we have not been able to fulfil this role”. These two examples of non-funding coincide with a crisis in the care service and a growth in family law cases.
But opportunism knocks. Sinn Féin’s crisis is the Government’s good fortune. Though Mary Lou McDonald’s party was already flagging in opinion polls, its recent succession of scandals has left it reeling. Anyone can see that not calling a general election now could be political hara-kiri for the Government parties. Anyone, that is, who puts the party’s interests above the country’s interests. How ironic that this is precisely what Government TDs have been accusing Sinn Féin of doing in its approach to child safeguarding.
“The Sinn Féin ethos we now see, which is so clear, is the ethos of ‘protect the party at all costs’, even if that means child protection is put into a distant second place,” chastised Fine Gael’s Colm Brophy. The criticism is not without merit but Government TDs ought to examine their own parties’ failure to protect all of Ireland’s children equally. Have we learned nothing from our State’s history of abusing, stigmatising and discriminating against our most vulnerable children – the poorest, those with disabilities, the sick, the orphans and those cast out of normal society purely because of the circumstances of their birth?
After McDonald made her Dáil statement on child protection last week, the media had so much to report and analyse that there was scarcely any space left to carry the statements of other party leaders. By the time they got their turn to speak, most of the seats in the chamber and the press gallery had been emptied. This too was a shame because some of what was said painted a disturbing picture of the Ireland children are growing up in.
Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns noted that children with disabilities and those in care are being failed while “there is a €24 billion surplus this year”, echoing Social Justice Ireland’s analysis that Budget 2025 “failed to provide adequate resources to Tusla for child protection and increased social provision for children and families”.
Noting “significant hypocrisy bouncing off the chairs in this chamber”, Aontú's Peadar Tóibín talked about the approximate 200 children who have died in the past decade having been in State care or known to Tusla. “This is happening to a group of children because they have no power,” he said. “They are from poor backgrounds and have nobody with wealth or influence to speak on their behalf.”
This week, gardaí have been searching for a little boy who went missing two years ago when he was six and is believed to be dead. Nobody in authority seems to have noticed in all that time that the child had vanished.
When election candidates come knocking at your door, will you speak for those children? Or will you allow your vote be bought by the parties that further enriched the comfortable with its splash-the-cash budget while withholding funding from the children in dire need?