Treatment of children makes for horrific viewing

TV Watch with Denise McNamara

If ever there was an argument that the country needs Prime Time more than ever – even if it severely wronged a Galway priest – it was aired on Tuesday night.

Like just about every parent of small children in the country, I was glued to my couch to watch the investigation into crèches, which had been widely leaked the week before after the facilities involved hired PR firms to get their side of the story out before the programme was broadcast.

It surely won’t live up to its billing, its thunder has been scorched, I thought to myself before.

After all it’s nothing new that some crèches breach the regulations, it’s nothing new there aren’t enough inspections – our sister paper, the Galway City Tribune, has covered several stories on the failure of crèches to adequately meet the standards set by the HSE. There have been revelations in the national papers and all sorts of promises to clean up the sector which were then quietly shelved.

Boy was I wrong. The undercover filming captured the core of what a thousand shocking reports could never achieve.

Children repeatedly being flung like rag dolls on mats, strapped up to three hours at a time in chairs, roared at continuously, in one case sworn at, force-fed – this is all behaviour that would never be witnessed by a HSE inspector or a parent.

The attitude of the childcare workers was deeply disturbing. When you think these girls get little over the minimum wage for a very challenging job – and in these three cases they were seriously understaffed – it’s easy to see why frustration creeps in.

I readily admit to shouting – okay sometimes cursing – at my kids, and there has been the very odd ‘clip’.

But there can never be any excuse for the plain cruelty witnessed on the documentary.

The regime of humiliation and ritual aggression which all served to create a horrific atmosphere in the institutions – which made millions of euro in profits, compounded by millions of taxpayers’ funding – left me feeling sick to my stomach for hours.

Some of the staff seemed to abhor the very sight of the kids, which makes you wonder why on earth they wouldn’t just go on the dole, surely they would be better off financially than spending their days in utter misery.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.