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THE GOVERNMENT’S SPECIAL Rapporteur on Child Protection has called for an “inquiry into the inquiry” on ‘Grace’.
Pressure is mounting on the government and on the Commission of Investigation over its much criticised final report.
Rapporteur Caoilfhionn Gallagher’s intervention this morning comes after the solicitor for wards of court, who represented Grace at the Commission with a team of lawyers, said yesterday that “extensive submissions” made on Grace’s behalf were not included in the final report.
Minister for Children Norma Foley will meet General Solicitor Marie-Claire Butler today to discuss the matter, a spokesperson for the minister confirmed.
Gallagher said the legal submissions, which Butler says were not included in the final report, could be made public. However, Gallagher said it was very important that whatever happens next involves listening to Grace, her loved ones and her legal team.
Gallagher told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the “ball is in the government’s court” to put matters right for Grace and for the other survivors.
She said the government must take steps to address the “vacuum of accountability we’ve seen” and “failures in the process”.
She described yesterday’s intervention by the General Solicitor for Minors and Wards of Court as “an alarm call”.
“We must now add these very serious concerns…to the very grave concerns raised by survivors and families, by the whistleblowers and by others who were involved in the process over the last number of weeks,” Gallagher said.
Whistleblowers and politicians who raised concerns over the case reacted with dismay to the long delayed final report on its publication earlier this month.
On the basis of the report’s conclusions, the Attorney General and the government has decided there is no basis for moving forward with any “phase two” of the commission of investigation into a number of other cases.
Gallagher said these families and survivors had been let down by the process.
“We need to learn lessons from the failures in this process to ensure that this simply never happens again,” said Gallagher.
There’s got to be essentially an inquiry into the inquiry.
“I simply mean there needs to be a quick fire review of what went wrong here, procedurally, so we never again have a process which is so far away from trauma-informed, and which lets down survivors, victims, families and whistleblowers.”
The Commission of Investigation has cost around €13.6 million so far.
Grace is the pseudonym given to a young woman with profound intellectual disabilities who was left in a foster home in the Waterford area for almost 20 years, despite a succession of sexual and physical abuse allegations.
Grace had a difficult birth and suffered significant trauma to her brain which left her with profound, lifelong intellectual and physical disability.
Grace was 17 before she got a visit from a social worker. She is now 46 years old.
The inquiry, which was established in 2017, was chaired by senior counsel Marjorie Farrelly.
The final report, which runs to 2,000 pages with no executive summary, states that the Commission is not satisfied that the evidence was such as to establish that marks and bruises seen on Grace were a result of her having been subjected to physical abuse.
The Commission’s report outlined that it did not establish that Grace had been subjected to sexual abuse over the years that she lived with Family X.
However, the Commission was satisfied that there was neglect in the standard of care provided to Grace by Mrs X, in terms of her clothing and personal hygiene.
The report did not find there was neglect of Grace in terms of the provision of food and sustenance while she lived with the family.
There is a finding of serious neglect on the part of Mrs X in relation to Grace’s dental care with the report stating there was also a level of financial mismanagement or abuse when it came to Grace’s disability allowance.
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