The High Court has ruled that the State has a constitutional obligation to cater for unruly children with very special needs and to provide suitable arrangements for their care.

The Minister of State for Children has responded that the Department is "currently making arrangements for the establishment of special childcare facilities by the health boards, in particular the Eastern Health Board, to provide care in a controlled environment for children who have special needs and who are out of control."

That wasn't this week's news, or last week's either. Those two paragraphs are from a news report which appeared in this newspaper in 1995, of a judgment in which Mr Justice Geoghegan established that "unruly children with special" needs had a constitutional right to adequate care.

He was one of a series of judges, at all levels of the court system, who have attempted to get the State to take seriously its obligations towards troubled and troublesome children. The most recent and perhaps most celebrated judge in that series is Mr Justice Peter Kelly, who, for some years, has been castigating the Government and health boards for their failure to provide adequate residential care. Most recently he warned that he may shortly have to take "unprecedented and dramatic" action to secure the welfare of disturbed children because the juvenile criminal justice system has been "reduced to a farce".

In this case it was the Department of Education and Science - responsible for institutions such as Trinity House and Finglas Children's Centre - which was the object of his wrath. On other occasions it has been the Department of Health and Children which has experienced delays in providing extra residential facilities for children in the care of the health boards.

Behind the courtroom drama and the headlines has been a succession of stories of tragic children who, to a very considerable extent, have been failed by the childcare system.

Some have been suicidal, some addicted, some abused, one involved in prostitution. Some have had many of these afflictions at the same time. In some cases at least they are the product, not only of tragic family circumstances, but of a childcare system which failed to help them when they could still have been helped. But as this parade of children continues, the question arises as to whether Mr Justice Kelly is achieving anything.

One residential childcare worker who has been closely following the situation for years has no doubt that Mr Justice Kelly is bringing about progress which would not otherwise occur. He has pushed health boards much further along the road to accepting that they are there to meet the needs of these children, he says.

"That pressure needs to be there. Peter McVerry [the campaigning Jesuit priest] was the only pressure for years." McVerry's vocal criticism of the failures of the system often angered health board officials, but "I think a lot of people in the health board were delighted that he was there, chipping away." Father McVerry is, of course, very much still there, "chipping away".

The greatest demands are on the health boards in the eastern region, where a major push is under way to provide facilities. But there is a genuine difficulty, according to this childcare worker, in recruiting staff. Staff turnover in the high-support area of residential childcare is high, he says.

The job is stressful, with overnight and weekend work, and they feel entirely unappreciated by the health boards. He believes the problems in getting and keeping staff present a major obstacle to the provision of the places sought by Mr Justice Kelly.

Some commentators would see a supreme irony in this. When it was possible to get staff, health boards, they would argue, showed little enthusiasm for facing up to the needs that were there; and now that the system is ready to provide facilities, it cannot get staff.

THIS view may not be entirely fair to health boards. It may be more accurate to say that politicians at national level discounted and disregarded the needs of children of all classes and most especially the worst off. The health boards facilitated this by failing to acknowledge the failings in the system.

The Minister of State for Children, Mary Hanafin, has said plans are well advanced to develop 110 additional high-support/special-care places in the State's 10 health board areas.

Some observers would argue that most of the resources which will go into these places would be better used in preventive projects, foster care and in ordinary, non-secure residential care.

The fact remains, however, that there are children before the courts right now who desperately need the facilities that have been promised - and it is not their fault that sufficient preventive services were not in place when they were growing up.

There is nothing the Government would like more than for Mr Justice Kelly to take off the pressure now, says Mr Tom O'Malley, lecturer in law at NUI Galway. "We all know how long it takes to get facilities in place. We are talking about a time-lag of some years." Given the State's poor record on providing facilities, it is important, he says, that Mr Justice Kelly "keeps up the pressure".

It was announced in July that the State is to appeal against an order of Mr Justice Kelly's directing it to bring into being special care and high-support units for children in seven health board areas.

Ultimately, however, it is the unrelenting public pressure which he is placing on the State to meet its obligations that will move the system forward, however sluggishly, in the interests of these unfortunate children.

pomorain@irish-times.ie