The Children Bill 1999 has been described as "the most up-to-date thinking on how to divert young persons away from a life of crime" by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, John O'Donoghue.

It includes the fashionable concept of "restorative justice", where "the child offender and his or her family will be involved in arriving at an equitable solution and the offender will be made aware of the effects of his or her criminal behaviour on the victim, possibly in the presence of the victim".

It sounds impressive, until you realise that the most important part of the "up-to-date thinking" has been left out: childcare. A State-supported holistic ethos of childcare from the cradle into secondary school is essential to prevent crime.

Society - and not just parents - has a responsibility to nurture children from birth in a positive environment, if they are not to become anti-social personalities. Holistic childcare also involves parent-care, because you cannot nurture children to become responsible future citizens without supporting their parents.

This is especially so when the parents may themselves have been neglected children trapped in a multi-generational cycle of disadvantage.

"I can identify the kids at the age of two or three who are going to have problems later," says Monica Cassidy, chairwoman of the childcare sub-committee of Planet, the Network of Area-based Partnerships. She runs a childcare centre in north inner city Dublin for disadvantaged children and their mothers, who tend to be single, early school-leavers, often with drug problems.

Cassidy's is the only service for under-threes in this entire vulnerable area, which means that she has a waiting list and has to turn away children in desperate need. She operates on a shoestring, ad hoc budget using inexperienced staff from a variety of training schemes, none of them tailored, as they should be, for the specialised area of childcare. She works in a dilapidated building which, through no fault of the local community which supports the programme, is not suitable for small children.

And Cassidy's programme is lucky. Thirty-six per cent of community childcare programmes get no funding from anyone at all.

She tells of young mothers of 16 and 17 years of age living alone with their babies in one-bedroom flats with no support from anybody. She tells of drug-addicted parents who are desperately in need of some form of respite care for their children. She speaks of seeing, recently, a two-year-old with a "doodie" in its mouth, playing in the traffic in a city street, "with all doors on the street closed".

She tells of a mother, forced to keep her child home from childcare for three days because the child's clothes were wet and the mother had no heating in her flat, and so could not dry the clothes. It is all very well to tell parents to be responsible for their children's actions, but when they are under such stress that they cannot function in their duties, it is not fair to blame parents. And when a cycle of disadvantage puts children at risk of crime, you cannot expect parents to break out of that cycle single-handedly.

The Bill introduces the concept of the family welfare conference, which is good because now, many parents don't bother to turn up in court when their children are in trouble. But what happens when families are so dysfunctional that the parents haven't a hope of controlling their children?

Generations of neglect cannot by wiped aside by a Bill. For the State to tell parents to take responsibility for their children, while at the same time the State is failing in its own responsibility towards parents and children, is hypocritical, to say the least.

For example, there are 463 troubled children on the waiting-list to see social workers in the Eastern Health Board area. Whose fault is that? Not the parents, certainly. And if one of these children gets in trouble with the law while on a waiting list, surely it is the State that is culpable.

Another issue involves how to occupy children during out-of-school hours. Once classes stop, the State wipes its hands of responsibility. Sister Malen, a nun in Ballymun, runs the Aisling after-school programme where children get hot meals, help with homework and engage in enriching activities aimed at boosting self-esteem.

It's a fabulous programme that can make a real difference to children's lives, yet Sister Malen has no idea where her funding is going to come from in three months. How short-sighted is that? Where there are no Sister Malens, you see young children running around unsupervised, either because their parents don't know or don't care what they are up to.

Last week in Lisduggan, Co Waterford, a derelict rat-ridden house was exposed by the Waterford News & Star as a sinister playground for out-of-control kids who intimidated local people. But maybe the kids had nowhere else to go. A government that claims to be caring for children - as it says it is doing in the Children Bill 1999 - while doing nothing about childcare, is bound to fail.

Hilary Curley, chief co-ordinator of Planet, argues that the Government sees childcare in a narrow economic context, as a means of getting parents into the workplace, when that is only part of it.

Childcare is an ethos which involves Government and communities supporting pa rents in their parenting role, whether or not parents work outside the home. But this ethos, which emanates from local communities involved in Planet, has yet to impress Government, which has made only superficial nods towards the childcare crisis.

The Minister for Health, Brian Cowen, seemed insensitive to the issue when he told the Dail on Thursday that 1,840 pre-school places have closed as a result of the new health board inspection process, a figure he dismissed as "only 4 per cent".

To see the parenting crisis in terms of number-crunching is typical of a Government that fails to see the traumatic significance of losing even one childcare place, for the parents and children involved. The Government does not seem to understand how hard it is to be a parent at a time when the traditional community supports of extended family are breaking down.

In north Tipperary, 3.8 children out of every 1,000 are in care, and 64 per cent of these are from single-parent backgrounds. These children are clearly at risk, but should we really be blaming the parents? Few pa rents wilfully neglect their children. This statistic is an indictment of a society that does not support vulnerable parents in caring for their children.

When you see how neglected children have been by the State, it is hard to feel hopeful that the State will provide the backup resources needed to make the new Bill work. Without resources, the Bill will fail, points out Roisin Shortall, Labour Party spokeswoman on children and the family. She welcomes it, but warns that as soon as anyone tries to implement it, they will see that the whole area of intervention and parental supports is grossly under-funded.

There are long waiting-lists for social welfare services and the probation and welfare service is under-resourced - and it is the probation officers, presumably, who will have to write the reports for the family welfare conferences. The emphasis on the victim in the Children Bill 1999 is ironic. Children who commit crimes need to learn that they have hurt people, because usually this is a foreign concept to them.

However, the reason they tend to lack empathy is because they themselves are victims. Children are the greatest unacknowledged victims of all and the crime has been one of State neglect. You can publish all the Bills you like, but you won't stop criminal behaviour among children until you break the cycle of disadvantage.