Will children get the even break they were promised so long ago?

ISN’T it funny how sometimes really important things happen and nobody pays them a blind bit of attention?

Those of us who write for the newspapers, and most of us who read the newspapers, love a bit of controversy or scandal. The fact that the Liberal Democrat leader has had to resign in the UK, essentially because his key followers simply didn't believe him when he said he had conquered his drink problem, was just the sort of news and political story we all love. Eating and drinking in it, you might say.

It's because of that love of controversy that so much goes on 'under the radar,' often largely unnoticed. And yet there are some stories that have the potential to make a real and lasting difference, and they barely get reported at all.

One such story that didn't get anything like the coverage it deserved arose from a press release on December 13 last. The heading on it read: "Minister Brian Lenihan Announces New Office of the Minister for Children Historic Development Which Places Children at the Heart of Government."

I'm always a bit wary of words like historic in fact, I'm guessing that whoever put that headline together did the announcement no favours. Significant, yes; important even. But most journalists would shy away from a word like historic.

Especially in this case perhaps, because Brian Lenihan was already the Minister for Children, so it would take some explaining for anyone to accept that a new Office of the Minister for Children was a genuinely historic event.

And yet, it seems clear the change that has taken place in the structures of his office could be one of the most important things that has happened in recent years, at least where policy towards children and young people is concerned.

Since the foundation of the State, indeed since the Proclamation of Independence, with its ringing determination to cherish all the children of the nation equally, there has never been one place where the rights and needs of children were given any kind of political coherence, let alone any sort of priority. Different people, different structures and different agendas addressed the needs of children in education, children who were sick, children with disabilities, children in trouble with the law, children who were hungry or homeless. There has always been a crying need for one over-arching policy direction, and it has never been there. Until now, anyway.

At least the potential is there. The first thing that appears to have happened is that the Minister for Children has been given a significantly elevated status. Instead of deputising for three of four ministers, as he has had to do for the last number of years, Brian Lenihan will now have an autonomous office that will bring together a number of functions under one roof. The Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme (currently in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform); the programmes and activities of the National Children's Office; policy work on Child Protection (which has belonged to the Department of Health and Children); the Youth Justice Service of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Early Years Education functions of the Department of Education and Science will be all under his control. And he will have the right to bring initiatives to the cabinet table.

To assist him in the task, one of the best-known and most progressive civil servants in this area, Sylda Langford, will become director-general of the office, a position that will enable her to initiate a great deal of reform, and negotiate it through the often unmanageable maze of the civil service system.

Why is it so important that this job has finally been created, and why is it so important that it be a success? It's important because, like so much else, children have been forgotten by the Celtic Tiger. There are, as you know, many commentators who scoff at the notion that our mighty economy might have failed in any way. But when you look at the situation facing elderly people, disabled people, sick people without a decent income; when you think about the number of young people (even with a decent income) who will never own a home of their own, you really do have to wonder what all this wealth is for.

HOW has it happened that official statistics reveal that 15% of our children, one in every seven, live in consistent poverty the kind of poverty you associate with hunger and cold and damp? I visit housing estates in Dublin (and elsewhere) where childhood asthma, caused by damp and cold conditions in the home, is epidemic. I know kids who go to school (when they go) without breakfast.

One of the things I've noticed about a lot of the estates where poverty is most rampant is that many of them now have a shiny new motorway or dual carriage-way running right past them, and in some cases through them. You can drive right past these estates without seeing them. Not only can you turn a blind eye, you can do it at 60km/h. These dual carriageways are almost the only way in which the Celtic Tiger has had an impact on those estates they have made them even more distant from us.

We tend to think of our kids as having rights, and of course they do, in every moral sense that we understand. But children in Ireland have very few legal rights. Until a year or so ago, a child born in Ireland had the right to be Irish, but that's no longer there.

There is no legal or constitutional right to a home, to adequate nutrition and nourishment, to basic health care, to education beyond a certain level. Unless they're charged with a crime, no child in an Irish court has an automatic right to have his or her interests independently represented. Nowhere in our constitution does it say that in any matter concerning a child, the interests of the child must be paramount.

Yet we worry about kids all the time. We worry when they start taking drugs, when they become pregnant too young, when they get involved in crime. Actually, I'm not sure if we worry about them or blame them. Throughout most of our history, the age at which a child could be convicted of a crime was seven. Several years ago we brought in a new law to change that to 12. But that law has never come into effect. It's still, legally, seven and that makes Ireland almost unique in the civilised world.

The change to 12 (with the exception of some very serious crimes) is one of the first things Brian Lenihan has promised to do. But he knows that if we are to be serious about kids and crime, we have to be serious about kids and early years education, about kids and child protection. If we're not to feel threatened by kids, we'll have to be serious about giving them chances and choices. It's a big job. We all need him to succeed.