The social services watchdog, HIQA, has expressed serious concerns about the inappropriate use of single separation as a punishment in the Oberstown Child Detention Centre.
Inspectors found that it was not always used as a last resort in response to significant risk and that one boy was put alone in his room for four days because he lit a cigarette in the centre's lounge and failed to follow a direction from staff.
They also found that young people were placed in single separation for reasons such as verbally threatening staff, using inappropriate language to another child and smoking.
The report on the centre, which is in north Co Dublin, follows an unannounced inspection of the facility last June when it was accommodating 48 boys, 27 of whom had been committed by the courts when they were aged between ten and 17, and 21 of whom were on remand.
HIQA inspectors found that management had made some progress in addressing deficits identified in an inspection last year but improvements were required in key areas such as the use of the restrictive intervention called "single separation".
Its use had significantly increased with 1,420 incidences between October 2014 and the end of last May, an average of six per day.
There was a daily average of 11 incidents per day in May.
They say its increase may have been partly attributable to improvements in recording incidents but the restriction was not consistently used in line with policy and procedure.
There was no agreed definition of the practice across the campus.
HIQA defines single separation as confining a young person in a locked room without the young person's permission or agreement, or separating a young person from his/her peers but not confining them to a locked room.
There had been six incidents of young people absconding from the centre in the first half of this year, an increase on the previous year and two young people escaped from staff while off the grounds.
One young person had been absent for a total of 16 days, but all others were returned to the campus within 24 hours.
It was suggested some absconding could have been due to the construction work taking place on campus as it had not been risk assessed.
HIQA also found that improvements were required in other "key areas" such as care planning, medication management and training.
Inspectors found challenges to maintaining staff morale and new recruits told them about the difficulties they faced working in such a negative environment.
Gardaí were called to assist staff in the centre once in first half of this year and, in the same period, just over 2% of staff were on injury leave as defined by the assault and injury scheme for the campus.
HIQA concluded that staff were not adequately supervised nor did they have up-to-date training in fire safety, crisis prevention, manual handling, first aid or child protection
HIQA issued an Immediate Action Plan because the children and young people were unfamiliar with the centre's fire escape plan.
The campus manager told inspectors no fire drill had occurred because of security concerns that young people congregating together in the units' courtyards could cause disturbances.
Reacting to the report the EPIC group, which advocates for young people in care, expressed particular concern at the finding that detainees at Oberstown do not have faith in the centre's complaints system, which experienced a surge in representations during the first half of this year.
Meanwhile, the Childrens' Rights Alliance called for an ongoing official review of the single separation policy, ordered recently by Minister for Children, James Reilly, to act on this latest critical HIQA report.
