Pictures were released last week of Daniel Aruebose. A three-year-old boy with beautiful brown eyes, whose body was left to rot in a field in Dublin, partly because State services had failed to check on him.
Daniel wasn’t a child who was born and taken home from hospital by parents who kept him under lock and key for years unbeknownst to anyone. He had a complicated start to his life. When he was born, he was given up for adoption and as a result, was placed into foster care for around 18 months.
From day one of his short life, he was under the care of the State. He was immediately a vulnerable child who didn’t have the automatic loving family setting with his parents that most babies are sent home to.
When he was a year and a half, Daniel was given back to his parents. The circumstances around this are unclear, but after his period in foster care, no adoption took place, and Daniel was sent home.
Tusla, which had been overseeing all the developments in Daniel’s short life, ceased its involvement with him and his family in 2020. That was it. After a year and a half in foster care, a child is sent home, and it’s case closed.
Tusla has described Daniel’s death as “an unimaginable tragedy”, adding that it will “continue to engage fully” with the Garda investigation.
Engaging fully at this point won’t do poor Daniel much good. It’s beyond comprehension how a baby can be in the care of the State for almost two years and then just be signed off before they’re even of school-going age.
No one realised that this child hadn’t been to preschool or had failed to start primary school. The most damning indictment of all is that the first time an alarm was raised was when the Department of Social Protection made checks on a social welfare payment related to him last month, and were unable to determine his location. They contacted Tusla who subsequently contacted Gardai.
In the Dail during the week, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said he didn’t accept what he described as the “automatic impulse” to blame the State. He delivered the usual political lines of urging people to wait until the full facts emerge.
What we know at this point is that a child who should have been closely monitored died, and his tiny skeletal remains were hidden in a field. What we also know is that it appears that the State was able to monitor his social welfare payments more closely than Daniel himself.
Had the payment not been checked, his death and burial might never have been discovered.
And they wonder why people’s automatic impulse is to blame the State on this one?
These are very strange days [literally]
I was driving one of the Barrtalk Juniors to school the other morning, with the radio on in the car as usual.
It was last Thursday, in fact, and the presenter informed us how it was International T-Shirt Day.
Now, I love the humble t-shirt as much as the next guy, and I wear a staple plain black t-shirt for probably half of the year at least.
But having a day to celebrate a specific fashion item seems a bit much.
Not, however, when you check some of the other wacky and weird days of celebration we have these days. There are A LOT, including last Sunday, September 21, UN Peace Day, which actually seems a much more deserving cause.
Among the weirdest have to be: Squirrel Appreciation Day [January 21]; Lost Sock Memorial Day [May 9] and Hug Your Cat Day [June 4]. How can these be real?
Then there’s: Take Your Teddy to Work Day; National Toast Day and even Barbershop Quartet Day.
My personal favourite is International Sceptics Day – for obvious reasons – just ahead of Don’t Go to Work Unless it’s Fun Day, which is celebrated annually on April 3, but should apply to every day year-round.
I blame the Yanks for much of the zaniness.
And we thought we were bad, adding a St Brigid’s Day bank holiday to the list in recent years!
If I could be so bold as to suggest one day myself, it might just be Manchester United Appreciation Day? God knows, we need all the positive thoughts we can muster these days.
McGregor pulls out of a race he was never in
And finally this week, I noted how Conor McGregor claimed he was pulling out of the Irish presidential race the other day.
I write ‘claimed’ above because he was never actually in the race to begin with, in order to be able to withdraw from it. I might as well announce my own withdrawal.
McGregor hadn’t a hope of satisfying the political conditions to run, either via the support of four County Councils or 20 members of the Oireachtas. And his predictable attempt to ignite a public debate to “change the anti-democratic” [sic] rules precluding headers like him from running, was also doomed to fail from the start.
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To be honest, I’ve little to no appetite for the race and who might win it [as long as we don’t end up with a populist conspiracy theorist in the Aras, which we won’t].
In fact, I’ll bet if they added a final option at the end of the ballot paper on election day on October 24, to scrap the office of the President altogether, then that’d be the romp-home winner.
The bookies have installed former Dublin GAA manager Jim Gavin as the clear favourite, but I just can’t warm to him. He seems cold and arrogant. Plus he treated the press disdainfully in his role with the Dubs, which is never a good sign of a person, obviously!
I’ll probably end up plumping for Heather Humphreys in the end. That’s if I can be motivated to go out and vote at all… Couldn’t we just save everyone the bother and keep Michael D to run down the clock as the final ever Head of State?
