Some years ago, John Waters was involved in the publication of a story by a certain magazine about the involvement of social workers with a troubled family.
The father had become concerned about his wife driving while drunk with the children on board. He went to his local health board, seeking help and advice.
Two social workers were dispatched to interview the woman, who told them that her husband was beating her up. They advised her to get a barring order, and within hours she had her husband thrown out of the house on an ex parte "interim" basis. Several weeks passed while the man, now banished from his home and the society of his children, consulted his lawyers and prepared his defence. But in advance of a court hearing, he received a phone call informing him that one of his daughters, aged nine, had been killed in a car crash. She had been travelling in the family car, driven by her mother, who was drunk.
We encountered prohibitive difficulties in seeking to convey to our readers the full facts of this appalling episode. Lawyers employed by the magazine advised that, since the matter had been before a family court, anything indicating the identities of family members would be a breach of the in-camera rule.
We had to publish without naming the family or the health board, but hoped the gravity of the facts might cause other media to become interested, and that safety of numbers might enable the legal risks to be overcome. However, although this was at the height of media hysteria about the Phillip Sheedy affair - which also had as its supposed moral kernel a death caused by a drunk driver - the mainstream media showed no interest. The story, deprived of oxygen, fizzled out.
Apart from last Friday's reassuring court outcome, what is positive about the recent appalling experience of the O'Hara family from Co Meath is that the Irish media showed a willingness to act in concert to push at the boundaries of what is permitted, thereby giving the Irish public a glimpse of the snarl behind the pious smile of the social worker and the Kafkaesque inversion infecting sanctimonious official invocations of "the best interests of children". That phrase is one of the most insidious in our public vocabulary, a weasel-clause that sucks the life out of every safeguard our laws provide for.
A few years ago, to much fanfare, a new direction in social work was proclaimed: henceforth, all practice would be "evidence based". Most disquieting about this was not just the implication that evidence is an optional extra: the mood of self-congratulation suggested a belief that the omnipotence of social workers is self-evidently benign.
Media scrutiny of social work has been thwarted by dubious interpretations of legislation intended for the protection of children and families, with the result that such laws have often functioned to conceal official negligence and wrong-doing.
There is no system of public accountability by which social workers can be called to book, no social work equivalent of the Irish Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Committee, which investigates complaints against medical practitioners. Yet, the State continues to extend to social workers powers that, if allowed to the police in combating terrorists or drug dealers, would provoke a massive social protest. Training for social work amounts to grounding in an opaque and ideologically driven worldview pursued behind the screen of the in camera rule and so absolved from the public scrutiny applied to other areas of State operation.
Objective scrutiny of social work is almost non-existent, but what there is supports the widespread anecdotal witness to appalling callousness, arbitrariness and ideological fanaticism likely to follow the knock of social workers on an unlucky door. Last year, the Family Support Agency published a report by Harry Ferguson and Fergus Hogan on State policy and practice with regard to vulnerable fathers and families. Though couched in careful understatement, it amounted, within the narrow confines of its remit, to a devastating indictment of social-work practice.
It showed that social workers had with impunity effected the exclusion of fathers from the lives of children on the basis of forms of prejudice related to their accents, tattoos, shaved heads, or what the report termed their "bulked-up physiques".
Usually, the State's entitlement to intrude on the lives of citizens is strictly circumscribed. Even when grave wrongdoing is suspected, precise literal account must be taken of legal and constitutional protections.
But in the most intimate, most sacred realm, all checks and balances may be bypassed, because, we are assured, the welfare of children can become such an urgent and immediate matter that extraordinary powers are necessary to enable interventions.
Hence this breath-taking paradox: safeguards of liberty are observed where they are relatively less vital, but not where they are most necessary because, precisely, of how much is at stake.