Paul Gilligan: Protecting children’s welfare needs to be a pandemic priority 

At a psychological and social level, when you sum up the losses children of all ages have experienced in the last year, no child has gone unaffected

There is a real risk that these restrictions will have and are having an impact on their psychological and emotional development. File picture: Pexels

Despite the many advances we have made over the last 20 years in Irish society to protect and enhance children’s rights, the events of the last year have reminded us of how brittle these advances are.

Resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, our adherence to the obligations and commitments we have signed up to under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has been impacted upon in ways we still have not fully realised. At a societal level, child poverty, and particularly food poverty, is escalating and the numbers of children and adolescents waiting for specialist mental health treatment are growing.