Just before the 1997 general election, deputy Mary Harney made some surprising remarks about how she read the State's obligation to support young single mothers and, by implication, their children. Although she repeatedly explained later she did not mean the mammies were scroungers, the words, reminiscent of an unreconstructed P. Flynn, seriously
Medb Ruane damaged her party - Dail seats fell to four.
Tanaiste Harney was no doubt mindful of the banana skin she had so precociously slipped on last time round when she took up the cause of family values at this year's Progressive Democrats' annual conference.
"Children, their education and welfare should be central to the whole thrust of public policy," she told delegates. "We have to ask ourselves hard questions about our policies towards children. Are we really focused on their interests? Are we determined to treat all children equally?"
Hard questions indeed. But in the light of Mary Raftery's current series, States of Fear, produced for RTE, they may almost seem easy, compared to what has gone before. Raftery's research proves Irish officials knew abuses were being perpetrated against children in state-run institutions, but turned a blind eye. The culture of childhood and childcare being excavated by her and others recently is one where attitudes to children and families consistently imperilled children.
The question for legislators is how to ensure it cannot recur. This week, the Government is likely to make a start by issuing its first major statement about how the State colluded in the systematic physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children in its care. The State could acknowledge that crimes committed against Irish children can no longer be placed at anyone else's door.
IRELAND has never been easy with its children. Observing the surfeit of fertility over food in the 18th century, Jonathan Swift suggested in A Modest Proposal that the rich roast them alive and serve them as burned offerings for English suppers. Writing 100 years ago in Five Years in Ireland, Catholic unionist barrister Michael McCarthy recorded the striking incidence of sending them to badly run institutions, where many died from malnutrition and disease, unless they had been fortunate enough to die on the back of the cart taking them there. Most of those deaths are unrecorded.
By the early decades of this century, Dublin's teeming backstreets had earned it the moniker of being the Calcutta of the British Isles. Almost two in 10 of its children under the age of five died from preventable diseases - preventable even in the medical and nutritional capacities of those days.
Despite the founding of children's hospitals like St Ultan's by Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline ffrench-Mullen, the child-hostile culture continued into the 1940s and 50s when, as Raftery's programme proves, State officials colluded with childcare agents in systematically abusing the State's first generations of citizens. Some of the alleged statutory abuses from the 60s, 70s and 80s are currently being prosecuted.
We hope to put those days behind us. But the past affects attitudes now.
Partly as a result of the Constitution's ethos, the State has never felt comfortable seeing the individual child as its direct responsibility when family culture is under stress. Partly as a result of laws which interpreted children as property instead of citizens, the culture has not encouraged us to believe we are stakeholders in developing the rights and welfare of children who are not our own.
Hence the uneasy paradox that runs through this painful debate. While the Government considers issuing an apology to victims of past abuse, current proposals about the status of children and policies towards their care are still being sidelined. One year on from the UN audit on the status of the child, which found Ireland lacking, legislative and welfare requirements have not been fully met.
Whatever measures are introduced to outlaw the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Irish children, this generation may be engaging in a new form of abuse, which is as subtle and as invisible to us as the crimes against children in state-run institutions were to past generations. In one possible future, this society may be found guilty of economic abuse.
Despite continuing initiatives like the "Early Start" programme, which targets a minority of disadvantaged children, issues of child poverty and childcare remain on the same back burner where the interdepartmental committee on the family are about to meet for the fifth time. These delays affect all children - those who have a wealthy parent and those who are among the estimated 400,000 now living below average income thresholds.
"The vividness of experience in the midst of inexperience" is how the writer Marina Warner describes childhood. Small hurts can damage you when you are a child. Big hurts can ruin you for years. Until relatively recently, experts believed children did not feel pain as adults did, whether that pain was emotional or physical. Perhaps some of the good people who let bad things happen to the children of the past without intervening did so because they persuaded themselves to share that opinion.
We know better now. But some myths survive. Baby boys aged around eight days old were routinely circumcised without an anaesthetic until as recently as six years ago. This first experience of what the culture expects of its little men probably informed the early days of most of the cabinet and senior civil servants, as well as leading businessmen and entrepreneurs. Other myths will take years to uncover.
The long-fingering of important political and social decisions about the status and welfare of children shows how hard it is to get family and child policy right. The Tanaiste's remarks are instructive.
"We could put hundreds of millions of pounds into special tax breaks for families with children," she continued. "But what about children whose parents' income is too low to be taxed? What about children whose parents are unemployed? What about children whose parents are dependent on social welfare? What about fairness and equality?"
Equal to whom, one might ask. Far from simply upping the children's allowance, or "gut money" as it is known to some stay-home mothers, the Government cannot raise the status of children without engaging in some complex policy-making. That is best served by setting up a family unit at the centre of power, within the Taoiseach's own department, where policy objectives will secure the political muscle they so patently need.