The twelve concerns Leo Varadkar was told about in 2014
IN HIS 13-page disclosure to Leo Varadkar in 2014, the whistleblower informed the former health minister of about a dozen concerns.
He had previously raised these with the HSE and HIQA to no avail – apart from finding himself threatened with disciplinary proceedings by the HSE.
‘I am writing to you under Section 8 of the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, particularly with reference to my concerns regarding the abuse of children and vulnerable adults,’ his disclosure to Mr Varadkar reads.
These are the concerns the whistleblower raised with Mr Varadkar. We have, for reasons of privacy, withheld the identity of those concerned.
1 SACKED FOR EXPOSING NEGLECT
THE whistleblower began working for the HSE as a social worker in 2000. However, he claimed he had been sacked later that year when he blew the whistle on a colleague who had failed to get a care order for a vulnerable child in danger eight months after a case conference agreed the measure.
‘The child in question was still living in terrible circumstances eight months after the case conference and nothing had been done to help him,’ the disclosure reads.
The colleague that the whistleblower had complained of was promoted.
2 PAEDOPHILE ADOPTS
BY 2003, the whistleblower had regained employment with the HSE and was a permanent member of staff in Waterford, where he was appointed social work team leader. That year, he became aware that a child ‘had been adopted by a suspected paedophile’ who had just moved to Waterford. He moved to ‘rescind the adoption, so the child could be placed with another adoptive family’. But the whistleblower encountered resistance and was himself subjected to internal investigations – and threatened with Garda investigations – when the suspected paedophile complained about him.
At one point during an investigation into how the Health Board had approved the suspected paedophile as suitable to adopt, the whistleblower claims he was asked ‘to change the case notes’. He refused.
In 2012 the suspect was jailed for sexually abusing a 10-yearold girl many years previously. He was allowed back into the family home to live with his adopted child after his release (see main story, left).
In all, the whistleblower says he raised concerns about this child for a decade without success. Instead he was subjected to internal investigations and to an online hate campaign by the paedophile.
3 HSE WORKER BUYS CHILD PORN
A COLLEAGUE of the whistleblower bought child pornography online and was arrested and prosecuted. However, between the arrest and prosecution, the HSE paid for the offender to attend a treatment programme for paedophiles at the Granada institute. It also funded the suspect’s master’s degree in child psychology at the same time.
The whistleblower questions why public funds were used in this way.
4 CHILD DIES DESPITE REPEATED WARNINGS
IN 2005/06, the whistleblower’s team was operating with a skeleton staff, resulting in several ‘near misses’ during which a child could have been killed.
‘We were unable to intervene in these cases due to lack of resources even though we were aware of serious concerns,’ Mr Varadkar was told.
The whistleblower wrote to all the HSE managers on the child protection notification team to warn that it was only a matter of time before a child on the waiting list died.
No new resources became available and, in January 2007, a child on the waiting list died.
The resulting internal report was never published – although resources did then increase.
5 WAITING LISTS MYSTERIOUSLY CUT
DESPITE the increase in resources, Waterford still had the worst waiting lists for child protection assessment and intervention in 2009 – with 750 cases awaiting attention. This rose to 1,000 cases by 2013, at which point the whistleblower claims hundreds of cases were mysteriously shelved prior to a HIQA review.
6 MANY VULNERABLE CHILDREN NOT CHECKED
IN 2007, the whistleblower reviewed more than 100 cases of children in foster care and found some had not been visited by a social worker in years.
His reports were ignored and it later emerged that one little girl had been repeatedly raped by her foster brother.
7 GRACE CASE
LATER in 2007, the whistleblower moved from child services to adult disability services where after just a few weeks he discovered the Grace case. He wrote to his superiors to say that if Grace was not moved ‘we could all be prosecuted for reckless endangerment’. In April 2017, the HSE reached a High Court settlement of €6.3m with Grace and former taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to Grace in the Dáil.
8 SLAPPED NON-VERBAL PRESCHOOL CHILD
THE whistleblower told Mr Varadkar of concerns about a ‘recent’ case in which the manager of a Waterford preschool for intellectually disabled children was seen slapping a non-verbal child in the face.
The board of management commissioned an external report that concluded that the manager could continue in her post since the incident had been a one-off. A colleague of the whistleblower took a stand on the issue and the board of management resigned.
9 TWO REPORTS IGNORED FOR YEARS
CONCERNED at how the HSE was managing intellectual disability services in Waterford, the whistleblower wrote two reports in 2008 and 2009 for his HSE bosses. He claims these were ignored for years until a change of management occurred.
10 VULNERABLE ADULTS STILL IN ABUSE SITUATIONS
THE whistleblower undertook a two-year audit of all case files in conjunction with the HSE’s disability service team. Concluded in 2013, this report showed a ‘legacy of dysfunctional childcare services of the 1980s and 1990s of many cases of vulnerable children who are now vulnerable adults living in the community with their families’. In some cases, these victims were still being abused by the same people who had abused them in childhood.
11 100 CLIENTS IN RELIGIOUS ORDERS
THE whistleblower raised concerns in 2013 that the HSE was paying for more than 100 vulnerable people to stay in religious institutions – without any knowledge of their circumstances.
No new resources were forthcoming. In December 2013 he was contacted by a family who provided evidence that their brother may have been financially exploited and physically injured while resident in a religious institution. When he brought the issue to his superiors he discovered they were already aware of some of the allegations – and that neither the HSE nor the institution had informed him, even though he was the designated person to receive and deal with such allegations.
12 CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
THE whistleblower told Mr Varadkar he’d provided all the concerns listed above via protected disclosures to HIQA and the HSE but received ‘nothing in writing as to how these very complex matters are to be addressed’.
He then learned that the HSE South had contracted a firm called Resilience Ireland to investigate the Grace case.
At the time, Ger Crowley was a director of Resilience.
Mr Crowley had just left the HSE South when he was commissioned to examine his previous employers and colleagues at the HSE.
The whistleblower was concerned about someone so close to the HSE being tasked with the investigation and he detailed these concerns in a second protected disclosure to Mr Varadkar in early 2015. He told Mr Varadkar that the HSE’s continued use of such service providers represented ‘an unregulated and unaccountable private industry that nevertheless is given a large say by the HSE in the lives of vulnerable people’.
Following criticism of these potential conflicts at the PAC in the wake of the Grace scandal, the Government commissioned barrister Conor Dignam to review the procurement of the Resilience report. The 2016 Dignam Report concluded that the HSE had not met its own procurement rules.