What a sorry figure we will cut in Geneva today when our Government admits that we cannot raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years because to do so would place an "intolerable burden" on our social services. Instead, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child will be told by the Minister of State, Ms Liz O'Donnell, that we are planning to raise the age from seven years to 10 - but even at that there are doubts that the social services can cope with the numbers of seven-, eight- and nine-year olds who would have to be given services outside the criminal justice system.
It is a shameful admission. All the more so because it is not the first time this reasoning has been used. Almost 20 years ago, the Task Force on Child Care Services opposed an increase in the age of criminal responsibility on the basis that getting into trouble with the law was, for many children, the only chance they had of getting help, so underdeveloped were our childcare services. To say that this is still the case today, is to say that our politicians and our civil servants have failed our children. Our politicians have failed because it is they who say, at the end of the day, whether services will be created and funded. And what of our civil servants? It is they who tell politicians what is and is not feasible. It is they, presumably, who produced the excuse which will be trotted out at Geneva today and tomorrow. When Mr Austin Currie was Minister of State for Health, Education and Justice he insisted that civil servants from all three departments meet regularly to co-ordinate activities. He spoke later of his amazement that there were civil servants in the room at these meetings who did not know each other. It was a striking illustration of the failure of these departments to streamline their activities. Yet it is, presumably, on the advice of civil servants that Minister after Minister has opposed what everybody else wants - a national child care agency with the power to provide the services that children need and with no buck-passing between one department and another. It is presumably on the advice of civil servants that we no longer have a Minister of State with responsibility for child care services in all three departments - instead we have a sort of sawn-off Minister of State in Mr Frank Fahey who will be confined to the Department of Health and who will not poke his nose into the affairs of other departments.
Meanwhile, children go without needed services and too many are left to the Garda Juvenile Liaison Scheme to help. Social workers are over-stretched, often spending their days looking for non-existent accommodation and other services for children at risk, and many of them working out of cramped, squalid offices. As Ms O'Donnell does her duty before the UN committee in Geneva today and tomorrow she might usefully ask herself what she has to do to make sure she and the country do not have to face this embarrassment again. There are two things she could do: she could support the establishment of a national child care agency and she could support the early appointment of an Ombudsman for children.