One would be entitled to assume that buying a child seat for a car would be a straightforward exercise - you go to the right shop, get the right advice and make up your mind, based on design and price.
The reality, however, is very different. You may do all of the above in good faith, only to discover that several factors will militate against you trying to guarantee your child's safety.
For a start, the seat you chose may well not fit your car. The design of every car is different and that includes the shape and angles of rear seats. A Nissan Primera has entirely different seats from a Volkswagen Golf, for example, and you are very unlikely to find a car seat that will fit both perfectly.
If you use a child seat that doesn't fit perfectly, the protection for your child is almost the same as if you had not fitted any seat at all. An unrestrained child in a 30 mph collision will be propelled forward with a force of between 30 and 60 times its body weight: to put that in perspective, a six-month-old child weighing nine kilograms would hit a windscreen with a minimum force of 270 kilograms.
The problem is that the people who design car seats and the people who design child safety seats have entirely different criteria in mind and the motor industry, it has to be said, is not in the forefront of a campaign to change things.
"Traditionally, it has not been an issue and the money has been spent on other things," an industry source concedes. "But people are now more conscious of safety and parents too are becoming far more conscious of child safety. We are slowly coming to the point where it will be a priority."
So, the consumer is left at a complete disadvantage when it comes to deciding about something designed to save a child's life, or at least to prevent serious injury. We are, in many cases, buying child seats that don't fit our cars.
It is a fact that, because of the different lay-out and design of seat belts and seats in cars, four out of five of us are wrongly fitting child seats.
The most frightening statistic of all is that 77 per cent of children who died on Irish roads between 1996 and 2000 were not restrained by anything at all. In total 69 children - the equivalent of three primary school classes - died in that period.
Of the total of rear-seat fatalities, 27 per cent were under three years of age, 26 per cent were between 13 and 15, 21 per cent between 7 and 9 and the remainder between 10 and 12. The figures come from a study by the department of paediatrics at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda and the National Roads Authority.
So, assuming you do regard safety as a priority, how do you ensure the child seat you buy is the right one? Go to a specialist shop which can fit the seat into the car for you. If you can't find a shop with experienced personnel who will actually go out to your car with you and with a selection of seats, keep going until you do.
Otherwise you may well end up with a seat that doesn't fit properly, or that you can't figure out. In either situation you're asking for trouble.
Tony Kealy has been in the child equipment business for years. On any given day you will find cars from various parts of the country outside his shop on Walkinstown Green, just off Walkinstown Avenue, Dublin. His shop is unique because all of his staff have undergone child-seat instruction, are knowledgeable and will bring seats out to the car and test them until you get the right one.
"About 80 per cent of child seats are incorrectly fitted," says Tony, "and the vast majority of children are not tied in properly. What determines which seat you should buy is very simple - the seat which fits your car best and is suitable for the child's weight. Follow these guidelines and you won't go far wrong."
So, the most expensive or the prettiest or the one with the neatest design should not be the factors influencing your choice? "Absolutely not," he says. "The right seat for the car is critical. Some people come here with a car that's not their own. We recommend they go home and get their car before even looking at seats.
"Even Britax, one of the world's biggest makers of child seats, will tell you that they should have a seat that fits your car but they certainly don't guarantee it."
It should be noted, however, that in Which? magazine tests, the cheapest seats were the ones which performed worst.
Tony Kealy gives talks on child car safety at midwives' classes and in maternity hospitals. "You'd be amazed how many people come to take their new baby home and ask the nurses if they know how the child seat works," he says. "That's if they even bring a seat. Nobody should even think about bringing an infant home from hospital without a seat, but they do. In some countries, hospital staff won't release a child in those circumstances."
Tony finds that people generally listen to good advice before making their choice. "They know we are concerned only with safety. We can point to things such as buckle crunch, where the buckle of the seat belt is restraining the seat at the critical point, instead of the webbing of the seat belt. The webbing is designed to withstand impact - the buckle is not and will break and let the seat fly forward."
The car industry has been lax on child safety. Even the ISOFIX standardised seating system doesn't mean that all seats fit all cars. Some manufacturers don't even fit the system and some companies don't even design cars in such a way as to be child-seat friendly in the first place.
Andrew O'Neill, an Irish engineering student in Britain, interviewed a child car seats adviser at a big store for a paper he was writing. The adviser revealed to him that Audi, Peugeot and Volvo were particularly difficult to fit child seats in - and the Audi A4 stood out as the most difficult.
The development of the ISO system has been delayed by the failure of the motor industry to agree on the best system, says O'Neill. The whole issue of child safety has been compromised for the convenience of the industry, with the Americans, Europeans and Japanese not agreeing a common design.