The Child Care Law Reporting Project last night published its third volume of case reports on its website, www.childlawproject.ie. This project is run by Dr Carol Coulter.
The project was set up in November last year in order to report on cases where the HSE seeks orders involving child protection. These orders may be Care Orders, taking children into care either temporarily or until they are 18, or Supervision Orders, where social workers can visit vulnerable children in their homes.
The cases published include a number where the HSE brought proceedings because of risks caused by alcohol or drug abuse on the part of the parents. The reports show that the HSE does not always obtain the orders it seeks. In one case an Emergency Care Order was refused for an African child who came to Ireland with four other children to be reunited with their father and uncle of one of them. DNA tests showed that the child was not the man’s daughter, though they were related, and this was the basis for the HSE seeking the order. However, the judge found the threshold for making the order had not been met, and refused to make it. Certain cases concerned details of the care a child already in care was receiving. For example, the HSE went to court to dispense with the consent of her parents for a child in care to take karate lessons.
The third volume brings to over 90 the number of reports of such cases published by the Child Care Law Reporting Project.
An analysis of these cases, and a further analysis of more than 300 cases where data was collected during court hearings on the children and their parents, the reasons for the orders being sought and the outcomes of the cases, will be contained in the project’s first Interim Report. This will be launched by the Chief Justice on 5 November 2013.
Click here to read an article in the Independent about this latest volume.
Click here to read an article in TheJournal.ie about this latest volume.