A four-person team assembled by the Health Service Executive at the weekend to investigate how childcare services dealt with a Roscommon mother and her children should be able to establish the facts of what happened in a timely fashion, the health minister Mary Harney has said.
Responding to claims from Fine Gael that a full commission of inquiry with powers to compel witnesses should have been established, she said: "I think sometimes we are very quick to jump to the conclusion that you need a full blown tribunal of inquiry in order to get the facts.
"Now we know from our experience in Ireland over the last decade where we have many such inquiries that they do not deliver information in a speedy fashion and I believe the form of inquiry thats now being put in place will get us the information we require quickly".
She said there were many questions that have to be answered by the inquiry team which is chaired by Barnardos director of advocacy Norah Gibbons and includes two HSE representatives.
She said Barnardos had a terrific track record in this whole area. "What we need to do is establish the facts and the quicker we can do that the better," she said.
"I believe the mechanism that has been put in place to be chaired by a very respected person from Barnardos is the appropriate mechanism to get the facts as quickly as possible," she added.
"But my own hunch at the outset not knowing the facts yet is that if we acted more thoroughly and more robustly and more speedily these children should have been taken into care an awful lot sooner," she continued.
"I think it is probably the most horrific case that any of us ever read about".
The 40-year-old Roscommon mother was jailed for seven years last week for subjecting her children to incest, neglect and ill-treatment.
Sentencing the woman Judge Miriam Reynolds said her six children "were failed by everyone around them". She said she was concerned by the fact that the former Western Health Board had been involved since 1996 with the family but the children had not been taken into care until 2004.
The judge pointed out that during that time the children had gone to school with head lice "crawling down their faces".
They had been wearing shoes which were two sizes too small, they had been urinating on the walls and defecating in their underwear. "Why did nobody do anything?" she asked.
The court heard a plan by the health board to place them with an aunt in the year 2000 was scuppered when their mother took a High Court injunction. It also heard that when social workers called to the house the living room was tidied up and biscuits were bought but only a few rooms away, there was chaos "with mice and rats running freely around the house and in the cupboards where the children's food was".
Alan Shatter, Fine Gael's spokesman on children, claimed the inquiry set up by the HSE should be fully independent of the HSE and that its terms of reference should be broader to look at what action if any school authorities, other health professionals or individuals in a position to report on the plight of the children took.