It is immensely refreshing to have a judge as outspoken and even human as Justice Conal Gibbons was this week. He presides on a daily basis over the Dublin Metropolitan District Court 20, hearing terrible stories of children abused and neglected by their families, and deciding if they must be put into care.
The issues he points to are not new. What is ground-breaking, though, is to hear a judge's perspective on the area. When he talks about being "troubled" by some aspects of the system and "appalled" by others, perhaps his words may carry more weight than those of myriad other professionals involved in the crucial but hugely frustrating job of trying to keep children safe in this country.
The judge's highlighting of serious problems within the childcare system is part of a slowly growing openness from the family and children's courts, which traditionally have been intensely secretive in their dealings.
While everyone accepts the need for privacy and confidentiality in cases which involve vulnerable children, the kind of blanket secrecy we have had to date has effectively kept the lid on a service which is seriously inadequate, thus impeding reform.
Take by way of comparison the care of the elderly. The intense public scrutiny of nursing homes over the past few years has led to considerable improvements in an area where the needs of a highly vulnerable group had been neglected for decades. Just as importantly, it also resulted in a number of initiatives designed to assist elderly people stay out of the nursing home system altogether. Increased resources have been allocated within the health system to allow people maintain a better quality of life by remaining in their own homes.
The business of public scrutiny is understandably far more difficult when it comes to children and families in the kind of crisis which results in a child being taken into care. But in a system where public pressure so clearly plays a part in where resources are allocated, the levels of secrecy surrounding childcare cases serve to ensure that the public will remain largely in ignorance of the profoundly dysfunctional nature of the childcare services.
Judge Gibbons reports that children at risk have on occasion been returned without consultation or discussion among social work teams to a parent in crisis even after Garda emergency procedures have been activated. He refers to the impossibly large case-loads of social workers, to frequent breakdowns in communication, and to "the lack of the necessary technology and systems that any modern agency would require".
This mirrors what social and childcare workers themselves have been saying for years, and their repeated calls for properly resourced family support services. Judge Gibbons's emphasis on the fact that a majority of children are taken into care for reasons of neglect reinforces the urgent need for the State to fund the necessary support structures for these families.
That intervention at this level of family support can make a difference appears to be supported by the Government's own research. A study produced last year showed a substantial regional variation in numbers of children in care. In areas where spending on family support measures was highest (the west of the country), relatively few children were taken into care - 31 per 10,000. By contrast, nearly twice as many (57 per 10,000) ended up in care in the east, where family support spending is the lowest nationally.
All of this of course relates to children who are at least receiving some level of attention within the system. Some of the more shocking statistics to emerge over the past few years relate to the numbers of children waiting for any kind of service for months or even sometimes years. Figures published at the end of 2005, for instance, showed that more than half of the 6,336 reported cases of child abuse had still not even received an assessment.
Children's Ombudsman Emily Logan last year reported to the Oireachtas on a sample of complaints in respect of child abuse made to her office. She said that many of the children involved in the 94 cases she investigated were left without support in abusive situations, sometimes for months after they revealed their abuse. The children, she reported, felt "betrayed" and in fear as a result of "having told".
It is difficult to understand why these services, so critical to thousands of suffering children, should remain so neglected. Judge Gibbons himself has perhaps provided a clue. He remarks that "much media attention is focused on the terrible abuses that happened in the recent past in the various residential homes, and on the awful sexual abuse of children, but little attention is paid to the trials and tribulations of families in crisis today".
He himself deserves credit for attempting to redress this balance. Might it be too much to hope that perhaps some of his judicial colleagues might follow suit? Thousands of children on the edge would thank them for it.