To replace one injustice with another cannot be satisfactory. In the past, children mistreated while in care suffered the injustice of seeing their abusers going unpunished, an injustice which appears to have sprung from a refusal to believe children and from a desire to protect institutions, particularly - though not exclusively - religious orders. Today matters have improved greatly, but at a price. Residential care workers spelled out that price at the 25th annual conference of the Irish Association of Care Workers in Killarney this weekend, and it includes the possibility that compassion and warmth could be driven out of child care as workers fear being accused of abuse and that residential care centres will become, as the association's president, Mr Noel Howard, warned, barren and sterile clinics.
The price includes also the stigma which child care workers say now attaches to them all. Revelations of past abuse by a handful of people who betrayed their trust have cast a pall of suspicion on the overwhelming majority of workers for whom such a betrayal is unthinkable. The price also includes the fear that an allegation of abuse can destroy a worker's career and social standing even if the allegation proves to be false. People outside the system would have assumed that by now a standard national procedure would be in place for investigating such allegations - fair and effective procedures consistent with natural justice. Yet no such procedure exists and all too often an allegation of abuse throws the care worker into what Mr Howard called a social and legal limbo - nightmare might be a better word for it - waiting for a telephone call or a letter to tell him or her what is going to happen next,
Thus a situation exists in which the innocent can have their careers seriously damaged by a false allegation while the guilty go on to encounter a criminal justice system in which they will enjoy a raft of rights based on the presumption of their innocence. It surely cannot be beyond the wit of the Department of Health and the health boards to devise a procedure which respects the rights of both children and of care workers. Perhaps such a procedure would go some way towards avoiding the advent of the barren, sterile clinics of which Mr Howard spoke. The child removed from home and family - however bad the home and family needs compassion and warmth and perhaps a care worker will give that child the only compassion and warmth he or she has ever experienced.
Indeed, when we hear or read of what was endured by some - not all children in care regimes in the past, the absence of compassion and warmth in their lives disturbs us almost as much as the specifics of the abuse. Could there be any greater misfortune than to make today's care workers fearful of being compassionate and warm in our efforts to prevent a recurrence of the wrongs of the past? None of this is to say that care workers wish to see a return to the days of the quiet transfer and the cover-up as a response to abuse: the presence at the conference of Ms Christine Buckley whose story of abuses in care, told in the RTE drama documentary Dear Daughter, shocked the country, was greeted with applause. Some of those who applauded work in Goldenbridge today. Ms Buckley praised the facilities at today's Goldenbridge and pointed out that she had never sought to place any stigma on people working in care today. That is worth bearing in mind whenever we feel inclined to condemn the many for the sins of the few.