It is a quarter of a century since planning for new juvenile justice legislation, to replace the 1908 Children Act, began. It is, of course, not yet on the statute books. We can say "of course" because lethargy seems to be the rule when it comes to planning for better services for children. The Child Care Act, after all, took 23 years to pass into law and be implemented.
Our lethargy has left us in a situation in which the Government recently admitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that it could not raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 because the social services could not cope with the number of children under that age who need help. Has there been an outcry following that admission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child? Have Ministers been coming out saying that the situation will have to be rectified, something will have to be done and so on?
At last week's seminar on marginalised children, addressed by Cardinal Hume, the Trinity College lecturer Mr Robbie Gilligan pinpointed another admission made by the Irish Government to the UN committee, an admission he described as startling. It came when the committee asked if the State "has adopted or is planning to adopt a comprehensive national strategy for children." The reply was that to date the State's concentration had been on dealing with individual issues. Eventually, the committee was told, it would be the intention to draw a wide range of individual developments together in the context of a national strategy.
Any student of Yes Minister can work out that this means "no, we haven't adopted a national strategy and no, we aren't doing anything about adopting one." And so we have courts sending children to remand centres for trivial offences because there is no other way to get help for them. We have social workers who put off launching official investigations into concerns about the treatment of children because they know they have nothing at all to offer the family. We have healthy children being hospitalised because there is nowhere else to send them.
What our policy on mandatory reporting or on an Ombudsman for children may be depends on whether you listen to Mr Frank Fahey or Ms Liz O'Donnell - neither of whom has a seat in Cabinet. It must be acknowledged, of course, that Mr Brian Cowen, Minister for Health and Children, has a Cabinet seat. But the Children's Rights Alliance, asked at a press conference what difference it had made that the Minister for Health now had and Children added to his title, could think of nothing.
What is to be done about this wretched state of affairs? Mr Gilligan suggested a social partnership, similar to that which has played such a key role in our economic affairs but devoted to building a better future for vulnerable children. Perhaps this is where a national childcare authority, of the sort demanded for many years by those campaigning on behalf of children, might come in. Such an authority, made up of the social partners, could produce a plan and obtain the necessary money to help vulnerable children. It most certainly could not do worse than the politicians and civil servants who have been charged with doing the job up to now. It is time perhaps they stood aside and allowed someone else to try.