MINISTER FOR Children Barry Andrews and Minister for Health Mary Harney will meet the Health Service Executive (HSE) today to discuss its latest figures on the number of young people who died while in care or after being in touch with social services over the past decade.
On Friday the HSE said at least 188 young people who were in care or in contact with social services have died over the period but acknowledged the number could rise further if social work teams around the country found evidence of further deaths.
Asked about the latest figures yesterday and how they were gathered Ms Harney said: “I don’t want to deal with the numbers at the moment because we need some clarity.” She expects this clarity to be provided at today’s meeting with the HSE.
“I think it’s disappointing that it’s taken so long to get the data . . . we should have the information to hand in a much more timely fashion for many, many reasons,” Ms Harney said.
“Minister Andrews asked for this data I think in March and it’s slowly coming to light now and to be quite honest with you that’s not good enough,” she added.
It was only after controversy erupted over the failure to provide the figures that the HSE said a week ago that 37 young people in care had died, up from 23 a week previously. On Friday last it revised the figure upwards by 151 deaths. The new figure, it said, was based on a wider definition of deaths to include children who were known to social services, or young people aged 18-21 who were in aftercare.
The majority of deaths were due to unnatural causes (102). Most of these young people died as a result of suicide (26), drug overdoses (19), unlawful killings (12), road traffic incidents (18) and other accidents (27). A further 86 deaths were linked to natural causes or health conditions.
Ms Harney, who was speaking after attending an international health conference at the RDS in Dublin, said children are generally at risk more within their own families than they are anywhere else “but notwithstanding that the State has an obligation when you have vulnerable children to provide services to them in a comprehensive fashion and where there are failings and where children die in care or where children die when they are under the child protection system it’s important that’s appropriately documented so I think we will be engaging with the HSE around these issues during tomorrow”.
The HSE also said on Friday that the number of deaths was comparable with other jurisdictions such as the UK and the US.
Separately, HSE officials are due before the Dáil Public Accounts Committee on Thursday to answer questions about the difference between figures for the number of children who died in care supplied to the committee in March and figures later released by the HSE.