AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
A friend was in raptures over the film Hamnet, its cinematography, and portrayal of grief. Did she cry? Yes, everyone did, came the reply. Hamnet is a fictionalised version of the loss of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son (11) to the plague at a time of high child mortality.
But how many tears do we shed for actual child deaths here in Ireland, when those deaths could have been prevented by the very agencies responsible for safeguarding vulnerable children? Among the recent tragic cases are Mason O’Connell Conway (4), murdered by his stepmother in 2021; Oisín Reddin (12), dead in a suspected murder–suicide involving his father, Wayne O’Reilly; and Kyran Durnin, missing for years before the alarm was raised in August 2024 and now the subject of a murder investigation.
Each of these children was on the radar of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.
Details of the failure to intervene effectively in Mason’s case, when concerns were raised for his welfare, have come to light following the Central Criminal Court trial for his murder. Mason was placed in the care of his father, John Paul Connell, and his stepmother, Tegan McGhee, in 2020, months before his death. His maternal grandmother, Breda Coffey, became concerned about Mason after Christmas, calling both the Gardaí and Tusla, the latter nearly every day when her concerns became more urgent. Checks made on the situation were perfunctory, according to the boy’s family. In March, Mason died from traumatic injuries.
Tusla’s website urges people to report children at risk “where there are reasonable grounds for concern”, either to a social worker or to the Gardaí, and says that “they will always respond where a child is in immediate danger”.
That response may not be followed up quickly enough. According to Tusla’s 2022 report, in the last quarter, 32% of cases waited more than three months before a social worker was allocated.
Tusla, of course, is not to blame for factors which drive parents and others to murder children or subject them to abuse, cruelty, and neglect. Child protection also depends on the vigilance of gardaí, GPs, teachers, and the public. But the agency, where referrals reached 106,000 last year, 10% up on the previous year, is clearly overstretched and under-resourced. A reform programme was introduced this year and, given concerns over deaths like Mason’s, things need to change or vulnerable children will continue to fall through the cracks.
The latest report by the Child Law Project (CLP), covering 77 cases from late last year, underscores an unsatisfactory situation. These include cases where judges criticised the lack of allocated social workers for the children involved, and those where care placements were unsuitable or had broken down.
In one particularly disturbing case, a teenage girl who had left her unregulated placement suffered sexual assaults and was raped by middle-aged men. There were cases of successful intervention too, like the three-month-old baby who had suffered fractures, including to his skull, before being taken into foster care, where he is now thriving.
The main reasons why children have to be taken into care are their parents’ drug addiction, mental health issues, or where domestic violence features. Children may also need to be taken into care where they have special needs and parents are unable to cope.
A decade after Tusla was founded in 2014, the previous CLP report showed that, in that period, 201 children had died, either while in the care of the CFA or under the child protection notification system. While 97 deaths were attributed to natural causes, nine were homicides and 32 suicides.
“Serious cracks are evident in the State’s response to children,” concludes the current CLP report, “including an acute shortage of foster and residential care placements; a dismal response by the HSE to meeting the disability, mental health, and addiction needs of children in care; and weak inter-agency co-operation. These cracks are having a detrimental impact on some of Ireland’s most vulnerable children.”
There is to be an independent review into Mason’s case, but will it provide lessons on how tragedy might have been avoided? The same could be asked about enquiries into Oisín Reddin’s case, where his father was suffering mental instability and had threatened to kill his son three months before he is alleged to have murdered him.
But such reviews won’t bring Ireland’s Hamnets back to life.
