I welcome the opportunity to focus the attention of Senators on the present situation in Brú Chaoimhín which has been functioning since 1978 as a shelter for homeless women and children and for battered women and children. The shelter, as many Senators will know, is located at the rear of the old St. Kevin's Fever Hospital and its present facilities consist of two separate prefab wooden structures which are quite small. I had an opportunity of visiting the shelter two days ago. I was very saddened and very depressed by what I saw. I am, therefore, glad to have this opportunity of raising the matter and I am pleased that the Minister of State has come into the House for the debate. I look forward to his response to a number of points I will make.
There have been a number of attempts to draw attention to the facilities. Women's Aid, now known as Family Aid, reported last December on the conditions in Brú Chaoimhín. A number of doctors who have treated children there have drawn attention to the facilities. There have been a number of informal meetings between social workers in bodies like Family Aid and the community care section of the Eastern Health Board to see what could be done to improve the physical facilities and the services offered to families who find themselves in Brú Chaoimhín. My understanding of the situation is based to a considerable extent on their professional assessment of it and their concern to see what can be done.
The two prefabs are both used as dormitories. One of them is locked during the daytime and the other one also serves as the living accommodation for any of the women and their children who are there during the day. One of the immediate problems is that there is no supervision in the prefab during the day and inevitably during the unsupervised hours, which are from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., there can be a certain amount of vandalism and theft of items.
Some 25 to 30 residents, on average, are in the prefab on any given night. The facilities where they live are very primitive indeed. When I visited the prefab, which was open during the day time this week, there was an open dormitory area with 11 beds and two cots in it. There was no privacy whatsoever, no curtains or partitioning between the beds. In a small room beside the dormitory there were three lavatories, two of them installed relatively recently, one of them out of order, and a small bath which is used by the women for washing their clothes, because they have no other laundry facilities, as well as bathing.
There are six tall rather unsafe lockers in the dormitory. There are no keys to them and they are structures which cause problems with children when playing because if they fell on a child they could cause some injury. There are no washing facilities. There is no clothes line. There is no office where families could be spoken to individually by a social worker. One-third of the prefab structure, unit five as it is called, is used as a shelter for the women and children and two-thirds of it is a sacristy and chapel which is used once a week. So more than two-thirds of the space of this long prefab is empty and yet devoted to Christianity. In the other third is the reality of a very urgent human situation involving very vulnerable families. If Christ had visited Brú Chaoimhín He would have had something to say about this strange sense of priorities. It appeared that it would be very valuable to Brú Chaoimhín to have more space and particularly more privacy.
The numbers using Brú Chaoimhín have increased dramatically. It was established in 1978 as an emergency provision for homeless or battered wives suffering from domestic violence. In 1980 the shelter catered for 943 bed nights, meaning 943 beds uses but, of course, some of those would be by the same person over a series of days or repeatedly throughout the year. In 1981 it catered for 4,508, in 1982, for 8,239 and for the first quarter of this year the number of women and children is 2,872 in these two small dormitory prefabs with the very frugal facilities that I have described.
Undoubtedly the number of women and children needing to use the shelter increased after the fire in the Women's Aid shelter in Harcourt Street. We discussed that on the Adjournment in this House at the time. There was reference to the building of a custom built shelter which I understand is in the process of being built. Perhaps the Minister of State will clarify the expectations in relation to the Women's Aid shelter in his reply. There is no doubt that the demand for the basic resource and facilities of the shelter is greater than ever. The economic pressures and the need for a refuge from domestic violence is a reality of life.
We must focus on two aspects of Brú Chaoimhín and that is what I should like to do in the brief time afforded by a debate on the Adjournment. First, I will focus on the physical facilities and how these might be improved and equally, if not more important, on the need for better services and co-ordination of services for the women and children who come to Brú Chaoimhín. In both these areas there seems to be considerable scope for improvement.
The physical facilities were examined in a report which was compiled by a community worker with the Eastern Health Board and a voluntary worker in Brú Chaoimhín who has been working there since January 1983. Copies of that report were sent at the end of May to the senior officials in the Eastern Health Board and the senior officials in the Department involved in this area. Copies were sent to Dr. P.K. Murphy, the Director of Community Care, area three of the Eastern Health Board, the Chief Executive of the Eastern Health Board, to Mr. Donoghue, the Programme Manager of Community Care, to Mr. Hickey, the Programme Manager of the hospital section, to Dr. Ivor Browne, the Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, to Mr. Pat Sheehan the Senior Executive Officer of the hospital section of Saint Mary's Hospital and to Mr. Andy Russell, the Assistant Section Officer of Brú Chaoimhín. The contents of the report are known to the senior responsible civil servants. There has not been much evidence to date of any substantial response to that report. One of the things that we can do during a debate such as this is affirm the importance of improving the facilities and services in Brú Chaoimhín because the families there are in critical need.
As to physical facilities, the main recommendation — this was certainly something to which I subscribed when I saw the situation — is for a full-time supervisor in the form of a housekeeper during the day time. It is impossible to do anything in relation to physical facilities until there is that supervision. If some physical facility is provided it may well be either damaged or removed if there is no supervision. Also it is impossible to create a proper supportive environment unless there is somebody there full-time. There needs to be somebody there to supervise cleaning, to ensure that the kitchen is kept in order if used by families in turn, and so on.
Secondly, there is no doubt that the building badly needs painting. It needs internal and external painting, internal painting being the priority. The provision of some form of partition between the beds, for example, a fire-proof heavy curtain, would be a high priority. If families are coming in distressed circumstances, often late at night, having suffered violence they should have some privacy. If they come late at night they very often want to sleep during the day time. It is often the case that several beds are occupied by adult women trying to sleep while there are 15, 16 or 20 children running up and down in the prefab shelter and in and out of the lavatory area and the kitchen area. Clearly that lacks the most basic privacy and decency. It would also help if individual tables and chairs were provided rather than have the single long table that is there at the moment. They need more cooking facilities and they need laundry facilities as a matter of great priority.
The majority of the occupants of Brú Chaoimhín are children and yet there are no facilities for children. I understand that the position is that children are required to be kept in during the daytime. Anybody who has children would know that one cannot require children to remain in a building during the day time. It is a form of cruelty to the children and also a further depressing aspect for the adults concerned. They need play facilities, perhaps an adventure play area. I saw the beginnings of a wall being built in an area which I understand will be used as an enclosed play area. Apparently that wall is being put up without any consultation with anyone. Suddenly something is being done but it is not being done in a way which perhaps somebody who would want to use it as play area would decide to do it. Perhaps the Minister could clarify who took the decision and what is intended in that play area. That presumably would mean that the children would be allowed to be out in that area.
On the question of co-ordination, the view of those involved in the resources of the shelter is that it could be better used if it was concentrated as a filter for women who are either homeless or victims of domestic violence. If they were to come to Brú Chaoimhín and then be filtered on from there to Family Aid or to Regina Coeli or the other hostels or agencies, there should be greater co-ordination in relation to where they would go and in relation to their health care needs, housing needs and legal needs. One of the frustrations of the present system where there is a lack of co-ordination is that some families end up in the shelter with four or five social workers dealing with different aspects of problems relating to them. Other families have no social worker at all and have no service of a psychological, health care or counselling nature. There does not appear to be a proper structured co-ordination of services.
I know that this is a major concern of the Minister for Health. At a time when resources are scare we need to ensure that we make a proper, thoughtful and well-structured use of resources. Brú Chaoimhín is a good example of where the shelter is being over-used in the wrong way. Sometimes women and children have to be turned away at 3 o'clock in the morning and have nowhere else to go. At other times, families have stayed too long in Brú Chaoimhín in unsuitable conditions because they had nowhere else to go. All in all, it seems inadequate that a shelter which is dealing with the most vulnerable women and children should have no supervision and no expert counselling during the day time, no privacy and no follow-up for the families. There is no proper continuity in the service.
Yesterday we spent some time setting up a Joint Committee on women's rights. In my view, the picture in Brú Chaoimhín is where women's rights begin. These are the most vulnerable women and children. Yet they are the most deprived in a society which characterises itself as a Christian, caring society. Therefore, I hope that the representations that have been made from within the Eastern Health Board will be helped by the political support from this House and that we will see better physical facilities and better co-ordination of resources and help for the women who come to Brú Chaoimhín and, in general, for homeless women and children and victims of domestic violence in our society.
