Children in Chaos

Remand centres are being used to deal with children who have behavioural problems because there is nowhere else to put them

Irish children with behavioural problems often end up in remand centres for juvenile offenders, because there is no other way to get help for them. The problem arises out of the inability of the Health Boards to provide facilities for unruly children and the only facilities that can cope with these children are juvenile offender centres. As a result children have been sentenced for minor offences such as the first offence of stealing sweets or a boy stealing his sister's coat.

According to barrister Mary Ellen Ring it seems that Health Boards often wait for an unruly child in their care to break the law. “You can almost be guaranteed that it is going to inevitably arise that these children are going to be charged with a criminal offence. At a certain stage the Health Boards have nothing to offer and it is as though they sit and they wait.” Once a child in the care of the Health Board has committed an offence, he or she can be sent on remand to a juvenile offender centre and many of the crimes that they are sentenced for occur while in the custody of the Health Board.

“There is a 13-year-old in a reformatory school who has been criminally charged. At five years of age he was suspended from school and there were numerous reports carried out on him. He needed services of a very special kind and those services were not available. As a result he has ended up in a reformatory school and I suspect will spend much of his adolescence and early adulthood in various places.”

She also says that children who cannot be accommodated by the Health Boards are often sent to assessment centres under an informal arrangement that is not governed by any law. “You can't commit a child to an assessment centre because there is no such thing as an assessment centre in the 1908 Act or any other Act.” We have this arrangement that has been going on between Health Boards, the managers, the courts, all of which is totally illegal.”

St Michael's Remand and Assessment Unit for boys in Finglas is one such centre.  It caters for boys from eight up to 16 years. According to the 1997 report, 19% of boys referred there were remanded for non-attendance at school. Mary Ellen Ring says this situation is also illegal, as the only sanctions that are available for non-attendance at school are a parental fine or a spell in an industrial school for the non-attender. 

Anthony Keating is the line manager of St Michael's and he admits that children are sent there on ridiculous charges. “ ‘Criminal damage to a door', means a kid kicked a door. Sometimes the kicking of the door happens in a Health Board home. In my view that is not a criminal charge. It is a charge of convenience that allows children to access the criminal justice sector.” He is concerned that more serious offenders contaminate children who are minor offenders or who have committed no offence at all.  “We had a kid who came to us with no criminal charge and he had one by the time he left.”

His fears are substantiated by the 1997 statistics from St Michael's. In addition to the 19% referred for non-school attendance, 28% were referred for burglary and larceny, 10% for malicious damage and 10% for car theft. 

The inability of the Health Boards to cope with young offenders was echoed earlier this year when the government went before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. They told the Committee they could not raise the age of criminal responsibility from seven to 12 years because to do so would place an “intolerable burden” on childcare agencies. Seven to 11 year olds, currently dealt with by the criminal justice system, would become entitled to social services if the age of criminal responsibility were raised to 12.

The 1996 Children Bill will come before the Dail again in the coming weeks. It offers a solution to the current situation with an amendment to the 1991 Childcare Act, which proposes to give the Health Boards power to detain non-offending children in high support units. It will take considerable time before it becomes law and the situation has been further confused by including a childcare provision in juvenile justice legislation. Many lobby groups have argued that it should be debated separately, to avoid confusion and to quickly bring to an end the current situation.