NINE STAFF MEMBERS at Oberstown Children’s Detention Campus were injured on Wednesday in an incident involving one detainee.  

Trade union Fórsa said four of the injured staff members required hospital treatment as a result of the incident.

It comes after two teenagers who were accused of “savagely” beating a 60-year-old man during a burglary while armed with a machine gun were released at the weekend due to lack of space at the detention campus. 

In February, The Journal reported that judges were unable to send a number of alleged child offenders to Oberstown because it is at full capacity. 

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland this morning, Fórsa’s media relations director Niall Shanahan said the latest incident is one of three “very serious incidents” that have happened over a period of ten days. 

He said a member of staff was assaulted on 8 June. This staff member was also one of the nine staff injured on Wednesday. 

“On 11 June, we had one very serious incident where a staff member had their face slashed. It’s what’s been described to me as a life changing injury.”

According to Shanahan, staff at Oberstown have tried to raise “mounting issues” in relation to staff assaults over the last number of years.

“What we have is a situation that’s becoming more and more critical, partly due to staff shortages. Staff have told me that it’s quite frequently they don’t have enough staff to cover the shift, so they are operating below capacity.”

Staff retention is also an issue. Of the 10 new staff that Oberstown took in this year, only two of them are still working on the campus.

Shanahan said the management group appear “unwilling to engage with the reality as staff are experiencing it when when they’re working their shifts”.

“Given the number of serious injuries that we’ve had over those three incidents over the last ten days, the staff members are themselves required to report these incidents to the Gardaí. Management don’t report to the Gardaí that anything like this has taken place in the campus,” he continued. 

“So it suggests an unwillingness, I think, to take responsibility to what’s happening to the staff on the campus. But I think more crucially, what we have is an environment that’s becoming more and more unsafe, both for residents and for staff.”

Shanahan said he has been engaging with staff at Oberstown for the last 15 years, and this has become “a feature of their working life”. 

Fórsa contacted the Oberstown management group “as a matter or urgency”, with a meeting expected to take place in the coming days.

“But at this particular point in time, I’m very mindful of the fact that we have, I think, four or five staff from Oberstown who are not going to be able to attend work for at least a month because of their injuries,” Shanahan said, adding that this “further exacerbates” the staffing problem at the centre.

“The longer this goes on and it isn’t addressed, the more unsafe everybody on the Oberstown campus is.”