Judge rules Hawley-led agency broke record laws on purposeful neglect
A judge has ruled that the Department of Public Health has broke the law by ignoring repeated complaints from sick children to its own inspection team.
The decision, made after an inquiry by the Children’s Commissioner, will mean the department will now face an action for contempt, and possibly a court action if the Department of Health says it has not acted to the law’s demands.
According to the Department of Public Health Act, an inspection team is given the authority to fine, suspend or expel a health department employee who is “in wilful or wanton disregard of a child welfare or safety regulation, or in wilful or wanton failure to carry out a child welfare or safety inspection”.
The Department of Health argues that “wilful” means “intentional”, and that the inspectors were not there to look for “wilful or wanton” neglect.
However, the commissioner’s report to the Oireachtas Ombudsman found there was repeated, and repeated, clear and specific, child welfare concerns, and that, through a lack of resources to carry out any inspection, Department of Health inspectors were not going to visit a number of children every day.
The Department of Health’s inspector general, Sean Treacy, was interviewed as part of the inquiry into what he claimed was a pattern of wilful neglect. He was also asked to describe “a culture of deliberate indifference” and “failure to implement regulatory and legislative requirements”. He said inspectors were given “a number of constraints” on what to do.
He also provided the Ombudsman and then the Irish Examiner with a series of letters and reports dealing with the department’s decision-making processes over the years, and evidence that staff made decisions as they saw fit — some decisions were carried out on a whim, some over a number of years. All of this happened in an agency that the Ombudsman described as “a state within a state”.
In its ruling, the judge said the Department of Public Health had consistently ignored the requirement to show the children were in need of protection