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The Ombudsman for Children has been waiting eight years for a whole-of-government policy on protecting children from concussion and monitoring the long-term effects of injuries sustained by children playing sport.
Documents released to Saturday with Colm Ó Mongáin in RTÉ Radio reveal no action was taken by the Department of Health, the Department of Sport and the Department of Education on foot of a letter from Dr Niall Muldoon which outlined his concerns, as Ombudsman, for the welfare of children who may incur head injuries while playing contact sports.
In the letter addressed to then Minister for Sport Shane Ross – dated 18 May 2016 – Dr Muldoon wrote that he had received correspondence from the Sport Collision Injury Collective raising “particular concerns in relation to head injury and concussion” and “the fact that a link between repeat concussions and cognitive impairment and other long-term problems has been found”.
While acknowledging the huge benefits to children from active participation in sport, he said “at a government level, it is important that a reasonable approach is taken to reduce the risk of injury in sports”.
“It would be useful if the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, in collaboration with the Department of Health and the Department of Education would consider developing a system of reporting injuries across all sports so that information can be gathered in relation to how children are getting injured in sports, including rugby,” Dr Muldoon said.
He also advised it would be “prudent” for the three Departments to “monitor the longer term consequences of how children are affected by any serious injuries they receive during sport, both in schools and in clubs”.
While the Ombudsman did receive an initial response from the relevant Ministers in each of those departments at the time – Shane Ross, Simon Harris and Richard Bruton – he heard nothing further.
A request for an update from his office to each of the departments in August 2022 went unanswered.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Saturday with Colm Ó Mongáin, Dr Muldoon said it was “very, very disappointing” that the documents released under Freedom of Information indicate there was no communication between the departments to advance his request for a reporting system to be established or for measures to be taken at a government level to reduce the risk of injury in sport.
“I think it’s an awful shame…it’s a missed opportunity to really progress the science of injuries for children and young people and learn from it and make their sporting life healthier and safer and the fact that I wrote in August 2022 and there was nothing subsequent in ’23, ’24 between the departments is really very, very disappointing,” he said.
Responding to the Ombudsman today, Minister of State with Responsibility for Sport and Physical Education, Thomas Byrne said there was no medical expertise within the Department of Sport to develop guidelines.
“The Department of Sport does not have medical expertise and this has to be led really [by] the Department of Health and the expertise that they have,” he said.
He said that since the Ombudsman’s initial correspondence in 2016, the major sporting bodies such as the GAA and the Irish Rugby Football Union [IRFU] had all developed their own guidelines on concussion.
Pointing out he had only taken up his role as Minister of State for Sport 18 months ago, he said he could not speak for what had happened in the department up to then, but he would personally be happy to meet with the Ombudsman for Children on the matter.
“If the Ombudsman contacts me on Monday morning, I’d be more than happy to talk to him and to respond to his correspondence and to follow up on what needs to be done there,” Mr Byrne said.
On the same programme, Professor Colin Doherty, Head of the School of Medicine in Trinity College Dublin, said concussion has to be recognised as a matter of public health importance.
“Our children are being injured regularly by concussion and there’s a need to address that as a public health issue in the same ways we’d worry about drinking underage, in the same way as smoking or road safety,” he said.
Prof Doherty also said it was not appropriate that sporting bodies were allowed to self-regulate and develop their own policies on head injuries in players.
“There needs to be multiple agencies and I would include the codes themselves,” he said.
“You cannot ask the codes for self regulation. You wouldn’t ask journalism to self regulate, you wouldn’t ask medicine to self regulate.
“They are part of the response, but they can’t be asked to do it on their own.”
Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on health David Cullinane criticised the lack of a response from the government departments.
“The Ombudsman said that what he was looking for was the whole of government approach and what he got was a whole of government failure,” Mr Cullinane said.
“It’s not that the ministers for sports and the ministers for health live in different countries. They sit around the same cabinet table. They are based in Dublin.
“They work together to bring government. It should have obviously been the case that a working group should have been established between the three government departments. That was the obvious way to proceed.”
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