TVScope/Padraig O'Morain:Wanted: New Mum and Dad, Channel 4, Thursday, November 10th, 9pm.
"They do not want you to love them. That is not what they want from you and they are going to do everything they can to stop you making that bond."
A foster mother is describing some of the difficulties of living and working with children who are in care and who can never return to their families.
"If you do not love you cannot be hurt, can you?" she explains in the second and concluding programme in the Channel 4 series Wanted: New Mum and Dad.
The programme is about the British experience of placing such children for adoption. Last week's episode told the story of two sets of brothers who will be split up.
At seven years of age Robert is ready to be placed for adoption. But his six-year-old brother, Scott, is not.
Scott has so much anger in him that he was able to smash a hole in his bedroom wall with one blow of his elbow.
While Robert is adopted, Scott is placed with a specialist therapeutic foster family for up to two years.
The viewer begins to realise what serious stuff this is for children on hearing the social workers planning "one final goodbye contact" between the boys and their natural parents.
Following the contact, parents and children will not see each other again until the boys are at least 18 years of age - assuming that the boys choose to see the parents.
It is a striking illustration of just how much the lives of children are out of their own control if their parents cannot or will not care for them.
Tommy, aged five, and his brother David, a year or two older, are in separate foster homes and are separated from their five brothers and sisters.
Tommy is being prepared for adoption. David's violent behaviour leads him to a therapeutic placement in a residential home.
In watching this programme, the viewer has the sense that child protection workers and foster parents in the UK have resources available to them that we can only dream of here.
For instance, in David's case, social service managers decided he should not have to spend his life in residential care. They have him assessed by a psychologist and, as the programme ends, they are arranging for him to go to a therapeutic foster home.
All this happens within a matter of months. In Ireland it could take years for this to happen, if it could happen at all, given the lack of back-up services.
How many Irish children, one wonders, are undergoing experiences as bad as those which led Tommy, Scott, Robert and David into care? How many will have no contact at all with child protection services which are no longer able to cope?
And some of these experiences are quite bad. When Tommy goes to visit his brothers and sisters he can hardly remember their names, his foster mother tells us. What level of neglect or of chaos in the family did it take to create that sort of situation?
As the programme ends, adoptive parents have been found for Tommy and Robert, Scott is in therapeutic foster care and David is in a residential home awaiting a therapeutic foster care assessment.
We do not know how the adoptions will work out. But that remark from the foster mother that "if you do not love you cannot be hurt, can you?" suggests very strongly that it will not be plain sailing.
These two programmes leave the viewer with a nagging question: was the invasion of the children's privacy justified?
We see some of them at their worst moments. Few of us would want our own worst moments broadcast on television.
Is this a case in which the end justifies the means - by helping children like them to find happy homes? And even if it does, how will these particular children be treated in their schools and communities with so much known about them?
The programme does not address the question. That's a pity and a serious omission in an otherwise excellent series.