The number of children entering the criminal justice system is likely to fall as a result of changes to the way the State deals with offending minors, according to the director of the newly established Irish Youth Justice Service.
The age of criminal responsibility is being raised from seven to 12 for most crimes from today, while alternatives to detention, such as community sanctions, are due to come into force shortly.
Michelle Shannon, the national director of the Irish Youth Justice Service - a dedicated section of the Department of Justice which focuses on under-18s - said detention should be a measure of last resort for children.
"It should only involve a small number of cases and I hope we will see it being used less and less with the greater use of community sanctions in the coming years," Ms Shannon said.
She was speaking at a conference on children and the law, organised by the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Ireland, in association with the Ombudsman for Children.
Ms Shannon said other positive changes included the extension of the child-detention school model to under-18s in detention and ending the use of adult prisons and St Patrick's Institution for minors in conflict with the law.
Speaking at the same conference, Dr Ursula Kilkelly of University College Cork's faculty of law underlined the importance of a creating a culture of respect for children's rights.
She said there were two broad approaches to help change attitudes in favour of the legitimacy of children's rights.
One method involved strategic litigation, using test cases to challenge individual violations of children's rights.
The other involved using children's rights standards - such as the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child - to measure the extent to which children's rights are being properly implemented in Ireland.
"Neither benchmarking not litigation alone holds all the potential for ensuring that children's rights are effectively protected in law and in practice," Dr Kilkelly said.
"However, it is through the combined use of these approaches - with the audit identifying the gaps that the strategic litigation may seek to fill - that the true potential of them both will be fulfilled."
