Report on children given cool response

A LANDMARK report urging radical reform of services for at-risk children was given a cool response when laid before government.

The long-awaited report of the Task Force on Child Care Services was finally finished in September 1980 — six years after the government-appointed task force was set up — and it ran to many hundreds of pages, making recommendations for substantial changes in the way the State cared for children in need of support outside the home.

As the previous year had been International Year of the Child, a commitment was made to appoint the country’s first children’s minister and Tom Hussey was made minster of state with special responsibility for children in 1980.