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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
Children with “acute mental health” crises, including psychosis and suicidality, are being left for up to a week in hospital emergency departments (EDs), unable to access suitable care, a report published on Thursday finds. Meanwhile, distressed mental health patients are leaving understaffed EDs without appropriate care plans, only to return weeks later in a “revolving door” system.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
The family of “Sarah”, a young woman allegedly sexually abused as a child at the “foster” home at the centre of the Grace case, has been left “potentially financially vulnerable” after participating in the Farrelly Commission of Investigation. They say the commission has agreed to cover “only a fraction” of the costs they incurred participating in the inquiry.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
Grace was born on November 24th, 1978, to a teenage mother who had been admitted to a mother and baby home in Cork two months earlier. She had a difficult birth and suffered significant trauma to her brain, leaving her with a profound, lifelong intellectual and physical disability and she is non-verbal.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
The final report into the so-called ‘Grace’ case, involving a non-verbal young woman at the centre of allegations of serious abuse in a care-placement over a prolonged period, has found evidence of “serious neglect” and “financial mismanagement” but not of sexual or emotional abuse.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
Richard Boyd Barrett (57) is typing a text as he greets The Irish Times. Apologising, the People Before Profit TD for Dún Laoghaire explains he is trying to respond to everyone who has sent good wishes since his announcement this week he is stepping back from politics to focus on overcoming throat cancer. “There have been thousands of messages coming in from every angle: texts, emails, social media, X, Instagram,” he says. “Really, I am amazed.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
The stress Ciara Mangan (30) endured over almost two years while awaiting a decision on her rapist’s appeal against his sentence was so severe she faced multiple doctor visits and investigations into her inability to hold down food. Mangan was subjected to a “predatory, violent rape” by a work colleague named Shane Noonan at a party almost 12 years ago. Noonan (30) pleaded guilty shortly before his trial was due to start and was sentenced to eight years with the final year suspended in July 2023.
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
A key argument advanced by Government for not accommodating asylum seekers looks set to be shot down by the European Court of Justice. In a significant legal opinion published on Thursday by the Luxembourg body, one of its advisers says Ireland “cannot use force majeure to justify failure to provide basic needs for international protection applicants”.
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
A surge in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among children is driving spiralling waiting-lists for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs), according to the Minister of State for Mental Health. Up to 70 per cent of referrals to one Camhs team in Cork are due to ADHD, Mary Butler said.
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
Catherine Coffey O’Brien (54) will “never know what lives” her six uncles and mother might have led had they been spared what she describes as “incarceration” in St Finan’s psychiatric hospital in Killarney, Co Kerry. All of the siblings had been placed in industrial schools in the 1950s after their removal from their Traveller parents. They had “brutal, tough lives at the hands of the State”, says Coffey O’Brien.
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3 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Kitty Holland
Legislation prohibiting “racial profiling” by gardaí and “vexatious charges” against some minorities are among calls in a hard-hitting new report commissioned and funded by the Policing Authority. Published on Monday, the study, Experiences of policing among Brazilians and people of African descent in Ireland, finds the communities “lack trust” in gardaí, do not feel taken seriously when reporting crimes and believe police take a “lenient” attitude to racist abuse and attacks.
