William Colquhoun’s mother believes her son, who died in 2008, was let down by the State’s care system
ON THE street he was known as “Scotty” because of his accent. The other kids liked him because he was funny and was up for anything. But he was also naive. He’d do almost anything he was asked to.
“That was the problem: he was easily exploited,” says a care worker who worked closely with him. “He got into a lot of trouble and he didn’t really know any better.
“If he was in a gang and there was a dare to shout something at a garda, he’d be the one to do it. Or if there was a fight, he’d be in the thick of it. Things quickly went from bad to worse.”
William Colquhoun was 16 when he was admitted into the care of the Health Service Executive.
He had run away from home in Kildare after his relationship with his mother and her partner broke down. He ended up in an emergency care hostel known as the “out of hours”, a service repeatedly criticised by social workers for its lack of structure and support.
It was the last place he should have been, say care workers who knew him. It wasn’t long before he was drawn into the brutish subculture of the street: crime, drug addiction, dealing heroin.
His trouble with the law grew more serious, too. One of his first charges was for stealing a breakfast roll from a Spar shop on Dorset Street. Within a few months he was up for a drunken assault and received a four-month sentence in St Patrick’s Institution for young offenders.
IT WAS a world away from his childhood. At the age of 11 he moved from Dunoon, a town outside Glasgow, to Kildare. His mother had her own trouble with police over there – which she declines to talk about – and felt Ireland was a better place for her and her child.
“He was a very normal, happy child,” his mother says. “He wasn’t boisterous by that stage. He did well at school, played with friends. He was no trouble at all. He loved fishing. He liked nature – he’d go out with his binoculars.”
His behaviour began to deteriorate shortly after he moved to secondary school. Looking back, she feels much of his challenging behaviour coincided with her decision to move in with her new partner.
William became difficult to manage and rowed frequently, she says. Soon, he was coming home late at night, often drunk or even stoned.
“He’d go to school in the morning and wouldn’t come home at night. We’d have to go up and look for him. We’d find him drunk or he might have stolen something,” she says.
“He was beginning to get out of hand. He’d be banging off the walls, or fighting with my partner. He went over to Scotland to stay with his grandmother for a while.”
Soon he was back in Ireland and things went bad to worse. Care workers say the system never responded decisively enough. He needed structured care planning: a special care placement or a secure unit with intensive support. Instead, over he space of two years, he moved through seven different care placements and had numerous social workers, but no real consistency of care.
“He was difficult, too. He didn’t want to accept help,” says a care worker. “He’d go out, come back drunk or stoned at night-time. It was like a form of self-harm. He just wouldn’t open up.”
When he went to do a six-week course at Harristown House in Roscommon – which offers addiction treatment services – he lasted just six days. One of the addiction counsellors said he was one of the toughest cases he had come across in 20 years of working, according to a care worker.
THINGS had begun to improve when he turned 18. He was in a private placement in Kildare, paid for by the HSE. He was away from the chaos of the out of hours service and began to make progress in a more stable environment.
One social worker remembers William saying: “If I’m surrounded by chaos, then that’s the way I’ll behave.”
After his 18th birthday, arrangements were made to place him in an apartment as part of a hastily-drawn up aftercare plan funded by the HSE. But, according to care workers, it was the opposite of what he needed.
“He needed extra support,” says one. “To put him in an independent placement was wrong. He was very developmentally delayed. He needed a huge amount of support to acquire the skills to look after himself.”
Out on his own, his drug problem grew worse. The day after receiving a backdated dole payment of €600, he went to Dublin and bought some heroin. Following a massive cardiac arrest, he was brought to St James’s Hospital, but it was too late. He died on July 20th, 2008, a few days before he was formally due to leave the care of the State.
Eunice Colquhoun accepts she was far from being the perfect mother. She accepts she could have been a better role model and that life at home could have been more stable.
But she feels let down by the State’s care system, which is charged with protecting the care and welfare of children at risk.
“It was the wrong system,” she says. “There was never enough support for him. There weren’t the people around to control his behaviour. He just got worse and worse. He went off the rails. No one seemed to do anything.”
A year and a half after his death, she is still raw with grief. “I think about him all the time. But it’s the way he died which is so upsetting. There was no one there, really. I wish I was there, or someone else he knew. He was just left to die.”