Many Irish parents have watched the Louise Woodward case from a safe distance, smug in the knowledge that it couldn't happen here. How easy it has been to condemn the Eappens for hiring the cheapest childcare they could find - an untrained foreign au pair at a rate of £75 per week - when they could easily have afforded a proper nanny.

Start talking to nannies and nanny agencies in the Republic, however, and you realise that a Louise Woodward case could happen here. The fastest-growing segment of the workforce is women with children under five, yet childcare provision continues to be ad hoc and inadequate. There are plenty of Irish parents who, whether by necessity or choice, settle for the cheapest childminders they can find.

"I get parents ringing me offering £60 per week for a girl to work from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week. They might have a baby six weeks old and a one-year-old and a two-year-old. It's pathetic, and in my experience the parents don't jolly well care," says Kathy Archer of Helpers in Galway, a registered agency.

A live-in nanny should earn £120-200 per week, depending on qualifications and experience. Irish parents who cannot afford this have traditionally hired unqualified French and Spanish au pairs to work all the hours God sends as childminders, but many of these girls have copped on and the au pair market is now being filled by illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe.

An au pair is supposed to be one of the family, who receives £35 pocket money in exchange for 3035 hours baby-sitting and light housework, mostly in the presence of one parent. For many Irish families, however, the hiring of an au pair is a euphemism for slave labour - 14-hour days on a wage of 35 to 60 pounds per week. Au pairs usually stay for only a few months, so that children have no continuity of care during their most vulnerable, formative years. "It's hard enough reliably checking references in English or even French, what chance have you got in Czech?" asked one source who had been approached to help bring in Eastern European au pairs but had refused.

Being a nanny or au pair is the one job that you can do with no qualifications whatsoever. Anyone who has ever interviewed a string of applicants for a nanny job knows that six out of seven give the impression of wanting to "work with children" simply because they cannot do anything else. With a co-operative employer, they can continue to draw the dole as well.

Since nannies are unlicensed, it's easy to get into the job with a criminal record. One source told, with some embarrassment, of nearly hiring a nanny who seemed fantastic, but when assiduously checking the nanny's references the source discovered that she had been stealing credit cards from her previous employer in order to pay a debt to the employer she had had before that.

Agencies which provide nannies and foreign au pairs technically do not have to be registered with the Department of Enterprise and Employment, because nannies are regarded as "domestics".

"Anybody can set up tomorrow as a nanny or home help agency with no monitoring whatsoever. I think the Government should tighten it up," says Kathy Archer.

At the height of the Louise Woodward trial, many Irish nannies imagined themselves in Louise's predicament - not in the US, but in Dublin. Get a few nannies and mothers together around a pot of tea in the kitchen and the horror stories come tumbling out.

One Irish live-in nanny in her 20s who is today working in Dublin for a decent wage and with good conditions, recalled her first job, when things were very different. As a 15-year-old in the southeast, she was put in charge of five children, the youngest an infant, for 12 hours per day six days a week for a laughable sum. "I hadn't a clue what I was doing," she says now. Only in hindsight does she realise how lucky she was that there wasn't a disaster.

Another nanny recalled being 16 years old and minding a crawling baby who fell from an open first floor window. The nanny - terrified - told no one, not even the mother. On the other hand, employers have found themselves in loco parentis, dealing with teenage nannies with eating disorders and depression.

Some parents feel forced to put up with less than adequate childcare because nannies are so hard to find. After years of poor pay and conditions, many Irish women who once would have loved to work with children are refusing to do the job when so many other types of well-paid employment are available. One agency is actually beginning to introduce English nannies to Ireland - but they're expensive at £200 per week live-in.

Yet £200 net per week for 40-45 hours work rearing children, which is after all the most important job anyone can do, is not an exorbitant wage. Unfortunately, £200 per week is unrealistic for most parents, given that it would cost them £10,000 per year after tax. They would actually have to earn £20,000 to cover the nanny's wages.

"It's getting so that only wealthy people can afford proper nannies," says Kathy Archer. What are the rest of us to do?

Licensing nannies and nanny agencies and making their wages tax-deductible would help enormously. Any US company which offers jobs in the Republic gets generous tax perks, yet thousands and thousands of Irish women are getting no tax breaks whatsoever for creating full-time jobs and taking women off the dole.

We cannot as a society continue to allow working parents to operate near breaking point and children should not be punished because their mothers want or need to work.

We have to think creatively about better ways of combining working life with family life. It's not enough just to regulate creches, since not everybody wants their children in a creche.

So far, the family-friendly soundbites promising some form of childcare subsidy for working parents offered up by the Taoiseach during the last general election campaign have proved to be nothing but hot air.

The Government's policy of turning a blind eye to unqualified nannies, unregistered agencies and exploited foreign au pairs makes it probable, if not inevitable, that a child will die before any Government steels itself to do anything about it.