DEAD AT FIFTEEN

When a tragedy such as the death of 15 year-old Kim O'Donovan occurs, it is
natural to look for someone to blame. When it emerges that the child has
been in residential care, the spotlight immediately turns on the health
board concerned. People naturally ask if this could have been prevented if
various services had been in place or had behaved differently.

Yet children run away from residential care centres every week. By and
large they are troubled children and, in many cases, they do not want to be
in care. It is doubtful if there is a residential care centre in the State
which is so amply staffed that it can go and look for children who abscond.
The most they can do is rely on the efforts of the Garda or hope the child
will make contact with relatives or with another service and can be brought
back.

[Would] I have done more to find her? The Garda have said they did not
notify her disappearance to guesthouses where homeless people stay or
organisations working with drug abusers because this would amount to
publicity and they did not have a family request to publicise her case.
This begs the question: if the Garda did not contact guesthouses or drug
support groups, what did they do? Did they do anything?

Responsibility for this girl's death undoubtedly lies with the pusher who
sold her drugs and with all those involved with the importation and sale of
these drugs. Nevertheless, we are entitled to question the response of the
statutory organisations which are charged with dealing with such cases. We
need a better and more detailed account of what the Garda did about this
case, not for the purpose of laying blame but for the purpose of improving
practice in the future.

We also need to put the case in context. That context concerns the needs of
children with behavioural problems. We know, from the parade of cases
before Mr Justice Kelly in the High Court, that our social services often
do not cope very well and sometimes do not cope at all with the needs of
these children. If we, as a society, can examine how her situation
developed and how the social services responded to her needs and those of
her caring, and now bereaved, adoptive family, some good may come of her
death. How can such an examination be conducted? Barnardos, a committed,
careful and responsible body, has sought a public inquiry which would focus
on the factors that led to this system failure rather than on the actions
of individual, hard-pressed frontline staff. Such an inquiry can be
designed and conducted with full regard to the suffering of the girl's
family and of those who have tried to help her or have loved her during her
short life.

In the meantime, we should not forget the children with whom she was living
while in residential care. For them the events of the past few days must be
shocking. It is vital that care staff can get any professional resources
they may need for these children not only now, but over the coming months.