I am quite sure many readers, like myself, will have found the accounts of the Social Services Inspectorate Report on Newtown House children's home alarming in the extreme. We all agree children in care deserve the full protection of the State as a birthright, yet in some cases, such as that of Newtown House, it would seem they were failed.

About 4,000 children in this State are in care. Working on the principle that these are best supported within the protection and care of the family structure, most of these children, approximately 3,500, are well looked after by foster families.

These families have never really received the due credit or resources they undoubtedly deserved from the State. The Minister for Children, Mary Hanafin, has striven doggedly to alter this state of affairs. In last December's Budget, for example, she achieved almost a trebling of the foster care allowance, to £200 and £220 for children under 12 and over 12 respectively.

For some children, however, fostering is not an option. A small minority of children in State care are too disturbed to be placed within a foster family and need more secure care which can meet their specialised psychological needs.

Kim O'Donovan was one of these. Newtown House was one such facility for the care of these children. As Padraig O'Morain commented in these pages during the week, what happened at Newtown House was predictable. The area of residential care had been neglected for decades, not only by government but by society as a whole.

Unsatisfactory levels of social provision dogged this State since its inception until fairly recently. Apart from short interludes of prosperity, from independence to the mid-1990s central government was always hard-up. On social policy, the hard and tragic fact remained that any compassionate sentiments of the electorate and their government could never be implemented into concrete policies while the State coffers remained so low.

In the area of residential childcare the problem in all probability stretched farther than a lack of funds. All Ireland turned a blind eye to the Letterfracks and Artanes.

In the 1990s, when society winced as survivors who, as children in need of residential care, revealed the abuse they suffered, little, apart from the usual platitudes of horror and disgrace, was proffered by the State.

When this Government established the Laffoy Commission in an attempt to investigate this abuse, as Barron, Moriarty, Flood and Lindsay are investigating other areas of our recent history, the question arose: why was this not done earlier?

In the mid-1990s we knew what was going on, we had the resources: why did nothing happen? How come it took this Government to accept proposals for a compensation scheme for survivors of institutional child abuse; to establish Laffoy, to even adopt a national children's strategy?

In 1995, in the FN case, Mr Justice Geoghegan declared that the State had a constitutional obligation to provide "as soon as reasonably practicable . . . suitable arrangements of containment with treatment" for troubled children. Then nothing happened.

After the 1997 general election the Government devised a building programme, based upon the needs identified by the health boards, to provide the requisite additional places for troubled children. The NIMBY blight once again took its toll. It was difficult to source sites. There were planning objections. However, the number of places has risen from 17 in 1997 to over 70 today, and hopefully 126 by year's end.

THIS area of childcare should be met, where possible, with crossparty consensus. Loud and boisterous assertions by some politicians of inaction in this area ring hollow and really do not advance the cause of solving a problem that should have been solved long ago.

This week, for example, we had a new principle enunciated in politics. It is known as the principle of "on the one hand and on the other hand". It has its origins in humbug.

A member of the Dail Opposition complained about the lack of progress on Traveller accommodation while at local level voting against the adoption of a four-year plan to house Travellers. After all these years, Leinster House still never ceases to amaze me.

To return to children in care, the Government established the Laffoy Commission and accepted the need for a compensation scheme for survivors of institutional child abuse, and also established a Social Services Inspectorate resourced by the Department of Health and Children which, to date, has inspected more than half of all health board child residential homes and whose recommendations are acted upon.

This administration has invested an additional £90 million in childcare services, and the Children Bill was the first major overhaul of legislation in this area since 1908 and also developed early intervention family support.

We may be at last coming to grips with one of the great social tragedies in our history. Much remains to be done.