Imagine an issue that was considered so serious that the urgent production of a White Paper, to be followed by immediate legislation, was a "key objective" in the 1997 programme for government.
Then imagine that commitment simply vanishing into thin air - no White Paper, no legislation, and incredibly, no one even noticing. This is precisely what happened to the once hotly debated issue of mandatory reporting of child abuse.
The 1997 programme for government committed itself to the introduction of mandatory reporting. Every few months for the next five years, the Fianna Fáil/PD Coalition promised that the White Paper was almost complete, only a few months from publication.
The Department of Health and Children identified the production of the White Paper as a main objective every year until 2002.
Then, in this year's departmental plan, all reference to mandatory reporting disappeared. Likewise, it is not mentioned in the latest (2002) Programme for Government. And not a single opposition TD or childcare professional appears to have noticed.
But there's worse. Up until 1997 it was a criminal offence not to report to the gardaí information in your possession that a felony (or serious crime) had been committed. This was part of the common law, and was known as misprision of felony. Many child sexual abuse offences were in fact covered by this provision.
For example, in 1994, in reference to convicted paedophile Father Brendan Smyth the then minister for justice, Maire Geoghegan Quinn, said in the Dáil that anyone who had concealed knowledge of his crimes could be prosecuted for the offence of misprision of felony. It is worth quoting the minister: "Under the existing law a person who knowingly conceals a felon, which includes a person who sexually assaulted a child, or the fact that a felony has taken place - and any sexual assault is a felony - could, depending on the circumstances, be found to be an accessory after the fact and liable on conviction to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment." However, three years later, this law was abolished.
The Criminal Law Act, 1997, in the course of redefining the legal terms of felony and misdemeanour, removed the offence of misprision of felony from the statute books. It was no longer against the law to fail to report a serious crime to the authorities.
It would also appear that the abolition was retrospective, i.e., that those who had concealed information prior to 1997 about crimes committed were now protected from prosecution.
Again, it is instructive to read back over the Dáil debates for the period. The current Minister for State at the Department of Justice, Willie O'Dea (then in opposition), expressed outrage that the abolition of misprision of felony would mean it was no longer an offence to conceal the crime of child sexual abuse.
And even that isn't the worst of it. The following year, in response to the Omagh bombing, the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act, 1998 was introduced. This made it a criminal offence to conceal knowledge of serious crime, which was defined as loss of human life, serious personal injury, false imprisonment, or serious damage to property. The penalty is up to five years in prison.
Child sexual abuse certainly qualifies as serious crime, and consequently should be covered by this Act. But not so. The 1998 Act specifies only one exclusion from its list of serious crimes - yes, you guessed it: any offence of a sexual nature.
As the Dáil debates for the time show, this was done specifically to ensure the Act was not used to permit mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse. Meanwhile the Government continued with its charade of promising to introduce separate legislation on mandatory reporting.
And then, last autumn, in the wake of the revelations of child sexual abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, the Minister for Justice was asked repeatedly what action could be taken against those senior clerics who may have concealed knowledge that crimes had been committed.
Mr McDowell tried to fudge the whole sorry mess that successive governments had made. All he could promise was some sort of a commission of inquiry, which almost a year later, has yet to materialise. Conveniently of course, it is proposed that such commissions should conduct their business strictly in private.
The reality is that the State has repeatedly acted to protect those who have failed to report their knowledge that children have been raped and sexually assaulted. Any commission of inquiry should publicly investigate not only the record of senior Catholic clerics in this regard, but must turn the spotlight on the Government and its own scandalous behaviour in allowing such heinous crimes to be covered up.
However, this may all be somewhat academic. Given the Government's record on such matters, it is unlikely such a commission will ever be formed. Like the promise on mandatory reporting, this one will be repeated earnestly and frequently for a few years, and then simply dropped.
And probably no one will even notice.