The Government must not use yesterday's Supreme Court decision as an excuse to further delay urgently needed action concerning children at risk, the Labour Party said yesterday.
Its education and children spokeswoman, Ms Roisin Shortall, said there were complex legal issues in the Supreme Court judgment dealing with the separate roles of the Executive and the judiciary which would require careful study.
"However, we must not lose sight of the fact that the reason these issues were before the courts at all was because of the utter failure of this Government to meet its responsibilities to provide suitable units for disturbed children", she said in a statement.
The Fine Gael spokeswoman on equality and family affairs, Ms Frances Fitzgerald, said that in the first instance the Supreme Court decision exposed the Government's failure to deal with the crisis in residential care.
"It is regrettable that hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money was spent on litigation relating to vulnerable children and teenagers instead of the Government implementing a coherent policy", Ms Fitzgerald said.
Fine Gael in government would start building a network of residential centres and would operate to a timetable, although it would probably take longer that one period of government to complete the network, the party leader, Mr Michael Noonan, said yesterday.
"We would bring forward proposals and we would stick to them", Mr Noonan said after the court ruling.
"There is such neglect in the area that I believe it would probably need more than the time available in one period in government to put the network in place, but we will commence the provision of the network", he said.
The Fine Gael leader said it was regrettable that hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money had been spent on litigation instead of the Government planning in a coherent way to provide the residential centres troubled children needed.