Childcare services - How can we ignore lessons of the past?

ANYONE who saw the RTÉ programme on Monday night that revealed how our overstretched childcare services can’t protect vulnerable children must be concerned that we learnt nothing from the appalling tragedies lurking in our past.

Unimaginably we are, despite all the bestial scandals of recent decades, still leaving children in the hands of those who might physically or sexually abuse them because our childcare services are underfunded or mismanaged — or both.

How can this be in the country of Ferns? The country of Brian Smyth and Seán Fortune? The country where old men are sent to jail almost on a daily basis for crimes committed against children decades ago? The country where tens of thousands of people have sought redress because they were abused as children?