A Child & A Failed Republic

Pádraig Drummond ✊ By the time the news broke, the machine was already spinning.

A ten-year-old girl, in the care of the State, God help her, had been assaulted in Saggart. The headlines came out polished and bloodless, carefully worded by editors; “She absconded,” they wrote, like she’d escaped from a boarding school dormitory and not from the yawning hole of a broken child-protection system.

No, she didn’t abscond. She was failed by every adult, agency, and institution that was meant to protect her. The kind of failure that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the slow, grinding, bureaucratic decay that’s been festering in this failed Republic since it decided paperwork was cheaper than compassion.

And you could smell it off the statements, the stench of arse-covering and liability management. Tusla “deeply concerned.” The Tánaiste “profoundly worried.” The Gardaí “appealing for information.” Everyone talking, no one accountable. The same theatre of solemn faces and empty condolences we get every time the State breaks another child.

But here’s the truth: this didn’t start in Saggart. It didn’t even start with this poor child. It started decades ago, when the new Republic decided to inherit the worst instincts of empire, the same institutional coldness, the same reflex to blame the vulnerable for their own suffering. We swapped the British crown for a Dublin bureaucracy and called it freedom. Now our orphans are statistics, our care homes are contracts, and our children disappear under the fluorescent lights of “partnership agencies.”

This little girl was “volunteered” into State care back in February, that bland, bloodless verb again. Volunteered, like it was a charity raffle. And then, while on a supervised trip into the city, she was left to disappear. The system’s first instinct wasn’t to save her, it was to describe her absence as an administrative glitch. “Absconded.” The word does a lot of heavy lifting when what you mean is we lost her.

Within hours, the same armchair patriots who wouldn’t cross the street to feed a hungry kid were out howling at the gates of Citywest. “This is our country!” they screamed, throwing bottles and fireworks at Gardaí. Two nights of pantomime patriotism, a carnival of cowardice disguised as revolt. You could almost admire the symmetry, a State that abandons its children and a mob that blames foreigners for it. Two sides of the same broken coin.

They called it “rioting,” but it was really theatre, the desperate playacting of a people who know something’s rotten but can’t face where the smell is coming from. It’s easier to shout about deportation orders than it is to confront the truth that our government, Irish, native-born, self-righteous, is the one failing to enforce safety, care, and justice. Not because it can’t, but because it doesn’t care to.

And sure, you’ll hear the usual chorus: “What about the man charged? He should never have been here.” Fair enough. But what about the Department that left a deportation order to gather dust? What about the agency that lost a child on its watch? What about the politicians who gut social services and then clutch their pearls when tragedy strikes? This is not one man’s crime. It’s a national disgrace, years in the making, and bipartisan in its neglect.

Violence against women and children is not imported. It is bred in every culture that values order over empathy, obedience over justice. It’s the same poison that ran through the laundries and industrial schools, now diluted and disguised under modern branding and EU funding. The Irish State didn’t learn from its cruelty; it just outsourced it to NGOs and called it progress.

Meanwhile, the girl lies in a hospital bed somewhere, recovering from a nightmare she should never have lived through. And the State will close ranks again, launch an “independent review,” shuffle papers, reassign a few middle managers, and move on. Until the next child vanishes.

We’ve been here before, Kyran Durnin, Daniel Aruebose, Vadkym Davydenko. Children dead or missing under State care. Each case “shocking,” each one “unacceptable,” and yet somehow, all of it accepted. This is not tragedy; it’s policy. Neglect on repeat, covered in the language of reform.

What we need isn’t another inquiry or a speech about “profound concern.” We need to dismantle the State’s moral cowardice. We need to remember that children in care are not problems to be managed but human beings with names, voices, and futures.

And we need to silence the vultures who circle every tragedy with their tricolours and their hate. These self-appointed patriots would burn down the city before they’d lift a finger to build a better one. They don’t care about justice. They care about spectacle, the rush of being part of something, anything, that feels like power.

But power isn’t shouting at foreigners outside a hotel. Power is holding the government’s feet to the fire until no child goes missing on their watch again. Power is compassion turned militant. Power is refusing to let fascism speak for the people while the State hides behind its failures.

The girl in Saggart was not lost. She was abandoned. And unless this country starts to look at its own reflection in the cracked mirror of its institutions, she won’t be the last.

Ireland, or rather, the 26-county fragment of a still-partly colonised nation, has built a petty empire of neglect within its own borders. A failed republic, parroting the manners of its old masters, presiding over misery with a tricolour in one hand and a clipboard in the other. And the rest of us, numbed by outrage and denial, keep pretending it isn’t happening.

Well, it is. And the only revolution worth having now is one that makes sure every child is seen, heard, and safe, no matter who they are or where they come from.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.