Red Statement: Tusla Failings And The Citywest Riot

There are serious questions to be answered after a 10 year old child, who was in the care of the child and family agency Tusla, was allegedly sexually assaulted by a man in Citywest Dublin. The most important person in this whole story is that child.

How is it that this young girl ended up alone in Citywest? Tusla are making excuses and disgracefully blaming the child saying she “absconded from staff whilst on a planned recreational trip with staff in the city centre”.

This comes only days after a young man in Tusla care was stabbed at a private flat in Donnaghmede Dublin that’s used by Tusla to house young people. Child referrals to Tusla are at an all time high and expected to be over 100,000 this year.

While funding for frontline work is sparse, the top dogs at Tusla are making a fortune while throwing taxpayer’s money at private companies. Tusla CEO Kate Duggan gets €211,000 a year, along with €6,000 in travel expenses.

15 companies got €56 million in payments from Tusla last year to run unregulated accommodation, known as “special emergency arrangements”. This network of private homes and apartments leaves children in the care of private individuals.

One company, Baig & Mirza Health Services, was paid €16.5 million by Tusla last year alone. The lack of state care facilities and decades of irresponsible neoliberal government policy, compounded by mismanagement by Tusla, leaves vulnerable children lost in a network of back rooms and private homes.

In January and February of this year 30 children went missing in Tusla care. In one case, a 12-year-old was missing for 18 months, but there were no meetings with Gardaí or attempts to locate them.

50 unaccompanied children who arrived from other countries were reported as missing. A watchdog said there were severe staff shortages “which impacted on the teams’ ability to sustain service improvement”. The Dáil has a lot to answer for.

Neoliberalism, what we used to call Thatcherism, is the economic mantra of all the establishment parties. It means privatisation and outsourcing public services to private profiteers. This economic model is the cause of our housing crisis, our health crisis and the placing of vulnerable children into private homes and apartments.

When the news broke that a girl had been assaulted at the entrance to the Citywest IPAS centre the usual suspects, online fascists and far right manipulators, were out in force on social media calling for the centre to be burned to the ground.

Even before the protests began on the night of the 21st of October far right groups were taking the focus off Tusla and the government and putting it on the other residents of the IPAS centre.

If one person in an apartment block was accused of a crime why would you attack everyone in that apartment block? If someone from North Africa is accused of a sexual assault why is someone from a different town or a different country to face the prospect of being burned alive in their bed?

If someone from Kerry committed a sexual assault would we ban all people from Kerry from other towns and cities? It’s ridiculous!

The Citywest complex houses many families and children who were terrified and couldn’t go to school the following day. They were all placed under curfew for 5pm because of the prospect of further protests the day after the riot.

The accused wasn’t even in Citywest at the time of the protests. He was under arrest and in Cloverhill Court the next morning. But no one protested there because the agenda was to focus all the anger onto all refugees.

The news headlines the week of this sexual assault case were also full of other abuse cases involving locals, yet none of these provoked any protests.

A Donegal man was in court charged with a total of 28 indecent assault charges, another case saw 7 men on trial for the abuse of a group of sisters, 6 of the co-accused men, who are aged between 32 and 55, are on trial for 98 counts of rape and sexual assaults.

All child abuse should be met with fierce opposition and those guilty of it should be locked up. But all cases of child abuse have to be met with consistent outrage.

The nuns and priests who battered and abused working class children for decades never faced angry mobs threatening to burn down their big parish houses. The rich bishops who transferred abusers from parish to parish slept soundly in their beds.

And the politicians and Guards who defended that system for decades were never held to account. The irony of this being that fascist groups like the National Party want to drag Ireland back to the dark old days of Church abuse and cover up.

And outlets like Gript media were set up by the Church-run Iona Institute. The Catholic Church was a key pillar of capitalist rule over workers in Ireland and there are those who miss its authoritarian boot standing on the face of the working class.

That’s why they want to divert legitimate anger over the abuse of a child onto people who had nothing to do with it. Their job is to keep us distracted and divided, objectively weakening our ability to actually take on the establishment.

In any workplace, like a hospital or bus garage, there are workers from all over the world. If those workers are at each other’s throats isn’t it obvious the bosses benefit? No strike where workers are divided could ever win.

Working class socialists understand that no faction of the rich is ever on our side, not the hypocritical liberals nor the authoritarians. The far right wants to convince you that one section of the billionaire class will take on the other. But money is God and no rich man is ever going to take the side of the working class.

The system wants you to believe that population is a problem. The population of Ireland grew during the boom of the noughties yet the economy grew, the population fell during the recession yet the economy shrunk. Less workers means less goods and services produced.

Almost 20% of the workforce are migrant workers, contributing their labour to this country. But under capitalism a building worker can build dozens of homes over a lifetime of work yet can’t affford to buy one themselves.

The real problem in Ireland is wealth distribution, it’s hoarded by leeches at the top and they are defended by a corrupt political system. We do all the work, they take all the benefits. We build all the houses, we can’t afford to buy them. We create all the goods and services and get little or nothing in return.

A workers’ state would guarantee that no child was lost into a network of back rooms run by private profiteers; those rich parasites would be forced to work for a living and care would be well funded and have democratic oversight.

The far right path only offers the same old capitalist system run by some rich authoritarian creep, blaming every economic mishap on refugees or other scapegoats. The return of the bishops to power would lead to more child abuse.

The liberal path offers the same old capitalist system wearing a liberal mask, depriving people of vital services so they are driven into a rage that can be exploited by the far right.

Instead we need to unite all workers and prepare for a working class revolution against this rotten system, a revolution that would put the working class in the driving seat of a planned economy. A socialist, planned economy, would have no problem dealing with immigration, everyone who arrived would be immediately put to work.

Right now thoughts are with the young girl and her family. In the weeks and months to come we have to get working to take this rotten system down.