Oberstown Staff Escalate Strike Action

Workers at the Oberstown youth detention facility have decided to escalate their strike action. Safe staffing is a central concern for Fórsa members who have been on the receiving end of attacks.

Fórsa assistant General Secretary Deirdre O’Connell said the industrial action is taking place because members want a solution, to ensure the safety of residents and staff at the Oberstown campus.

“These are social care workers working in an environment with a wide variety of needs, with an absolute focus on the safety of the young people in their care,” she said. Workers will escalate their action with a 48-hour strike from Monday 31st of August.

The centre holds about 40 children at any given time and is forced to operate at its safe legal limit for boys. Oberstown’s 2025 Annual Report shows 71% of the children have documented histories of severe drug or alcohol misuse. The staff at the centre make sure that children in the centre engage in rehabilitation work and sit their state exams.

This is vital rehabilitative work. But the numbers at Oberstown could be greatly reduced by a greater focus on youth diversion programmes, more investment in our communities and removing those who are in the centre on remand, who haven’t even been sentenced.

The state could invest more in bail monitoring where children awaiting trial are sent home but have a mentor engaging with them.

Ireland’s Census 2016 recorded about 375,000 people in the 12 to 17 years age category. Garda figures indicate that only about 3% of that number will actually commit an offence annually. In youth cases coming before the Courts, over 50% are dismissed, highlighting the minor nature of a lot of youth crime.

If you filtered out non-violent offences, those on remand and those who should be with mental health services, then Oberstown would continue to hold only those who present a clear danger to the public. This would more than half numbers and present the staff with a more manageable situation.

Even the Guards acknowledge that most children grow out of dysfunctional behaviour. Work disciplines. Once people get a job they are socialised. The best way to deal with the majority of youth crime is to send these teens to work.

The consequences of government inaction over Oberstown are clear. Over a 2 year period, Oberstown recorded 443 notifiable safety incidents and more than 70 assaults. The ratio of staff to inmates needs to be much higher for the safety of both.

Ultimately government report after government report has shown that deprivation is the driver of the vast majority of youth crime. You could list the estates and communities these kids come from off the top of your head.

We need to make sure staff and children are safe but we also need to fight to cut off the pipeline, to build a society where the economic underpinnings of communities are stable and we can prevent kids from falling into a life of drugs and violence.

But even in a socialist society the legacies of capitalism would force us to deal with violent offenders, rapists and others who threaten society, with rational forms of detention.

The crisis at Oberstown is a direct symptom of a neoliberal state that starves public services, ignores frontline worker safety, and is too quick to use confinement to manage the human fallout from poverty.