At this point in our history, we are more aware than ever of the ways in which the State and other powerful institutions have failed children. In that light, the National Children's Strategy, published by the Government yesterday, is particularly welcome. Since its foundation, the State has housed children, educated them and provided them with health care. It has also institutionalised them, ignored them and left those most in need to their exhausted parents or - too often - to the mercies of the criminal justice system.
What it has not done is to give children enough of the support they and their families need, delivered in an effective way. Services have been fragmented and uneven. People working with children, no less than the children's parents, have found the system baffling and sometimes impenetrable.
The National Children's Strategy provides for agencies which will have a good chance of changing this. The most important of these, perhaps, is the National Children's Office. It will have the task of providing solutions to problems, and there is a myriad of these. It will ensure that Government departments work effectively together to support children and their families. It will be able to recommend changes in how responsibility for children is divided up between different departments. A powerful agency, such as the National Children's Office, can co-ordinate the activities of these departments in relation to children. Voluntary groups have called for such an agency for many years.
For families, a new ally is promised in the form of an Ombudsman for Children. This will provide a way of cutting through the complexity and frustration which can be involved in dealing with officialdom. It will also put on the side of families a body which has the power to get answers and files and to report on what it finds. The strategy also promises investment in leisure facilities for children of all ages. The shortage of such facilities has been a particularly mean-spirited aspect of how the State has viewed children.
The new strategy owes much to the work of successive Ministers of State for Children. The plan to appoint an Ombudsman for Children was first announced by Mr Austin Currie as was the creation - already achieved - of a Social Services Inspectorate. The strategy has been pushed forward by his successors, Mr Frank Fahey and Ms Mary Hanafin.
But it is not all down to Ministers. As the Children's Rights Alliance noted yesterday, the development of a strategy was recommended by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child nearly three years ago. That committee was unimpressed by the State's provision for children and was able to rely on information from the Children's Rights Alliance in reaching its conclusions. The Alliance represents non-governmental organisations and individuals working with children in Ireland. These organisations over the years have called for many of the things which the Government promised to do yesterday.
It may have taken a long time, but the strategy augurs well for the future. That it was launched by the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste, suggests that it is being taken very seriously. The test will be for the declared intent to be backed up with money and with powers.