The failure of the North Western Health Board to protect the McColgan children from years of savagery at the hands of their father is an outrage and raises again the question of mandatory reporting of child abuse. Time after time, teachers, nurses, doctors and gardai passed information to the North Western Health Board which should have brought swift and decisive action but did not.
We may never know why this failure occurred. The much-promised social services inspectorate which could investigate such matters and publish its report has still not seen the light of day.
It can be argued that mandatory reporting would not have resulted in the health board knowing anything more than it already knew. There are two points to be made about this. First, the fact that the board lamentably failed to act on what was in front of its nose cannot mean that professionals should not be obliged to report suspected abuse of children. Second, health boards have greater powers now than they had at the time the McColgans were being abused. And health boards have been sensitised to the need to act on the information they receive.
Recent research in the North Western Health Board area suggests that teachers there are often reluctant to report concerns about the abuse or neglect of children - although many say they would make such reports under a system of mandatory reporting. This surely constitutes a strong argument in favour of such reporting.
Social workers appear to be largely opposed to mandatory reporting. Already, they say, they have to leave children vulnerable because they have no services for them. What are they to do if still more reports come flooding in? This attitude is understandable. In many respects, social workers are not listened to by health boards - they are most certainly not listened to in the national departments. Thus, they have no reason to believe they will be listened to if mandatory reporting is introduced.
Yet as the ISPCC said this week, the enactment of mandatory reporting might, in itself, create an enormous pressure for funding to be put into creating services for children and would give governments something to which they would be forced to react.
The other institution that needs to be put into place is an Ombudsman for Children, as recommended yesterday by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Such an institution, had it existed at the time, and had it received a complaint, might well have harried the North Western Health Board into intervening effectively in the McColgan family tragedy before it was too late.