Understanding social care

As the English writer L. P. Hartley noted in opening his 1953 novel The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. The previous edition of this book was published in 2013, and indeed Ireland then was in many ways a substantially different place. It was a country that had suffered the ignominy of being ‘bailed out’ by our European partners after the trauma of the financial crash that had commenced in 2008. Hard to believe now, but commentators bemoaned the excessive level of construction of houses and hotels, marriage equality for LGBTQ+ people was still an aspiration, and women were forced to leave the country to access pregnancy termination. In the field of social care, the establishment of the Social Care Workers Registration Board was still in the future, Tusla had yet to be constituted as an independent statutory agency, and key advances in safeguarding the rights of children and advocacy remained to be implemented. Some of the worst features of ‘care’ in Ireland’s past had yet to emerge: we knew little of the children’s bodies interred without record in the grounds of ‘mother and baby homes’. It is fair to say that the world of social care has, over the last decade, been transformed in many ways and, most would argue, for the better.