The Government will publish a National Children's Strategy, the Minister for Health and Children said yesterday - but within hours a senior UN official cast doubt on the strength of the Minister's commitment. Mr Cowen made the announcement while performing the official opening of a conference organised by the Children's Rights Alliance at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, where the keynote speaker was the chairwoman of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Ms Sandra Mason.
Earlier this year, the committee criticised the lack of a national strategy on children and Mr Cowen announced yesterday that "the Government's most significant response has been to agree that a National Children's Strategy will be drawn up."
"This addresses a fundamental criticism of the UN committee and at the same time will allow us to respond to all the issues that impact on children in a far more structured way than has been the case to date.
"There will be wide consultation with interested bodies and with the public at large before this strategy is finalised," he said.
But during a panel discussion after the Minister had left, Ms Mason said, in response to a question from the floor, that "perhaps the Minister said that this morning to appease us. He might have had wind of the fact that this was one of the concerns I would raise."
However, Mr Eamon Corcoran, assistant principal officer in the childcare policy unit of the Department said the National Children's Strategy "has been on our work programme for quite a few months now and we have done some preliminary work on it". Mr Cowen was not in the habit of saying things to appease people, he said.
During her address to the conference, Ms Mason repeated the committee's recommendation that an Ombudsman for children be appointed in Ireland.
This was a proposal which the committee made to governments in general, she said. It was important that there be someone in a country who could be the focal point of complaints for children.
Other speakers also called for the appointment of an Ombudsman for children.
Children "often get lost in the political shuffle", Ms Lesley Miller, who represented UNICEF at the conference, said. "They have no vote, voice or avenues to demand their rights."
An Ombudsman for children could "magnify their voices, so that their views and interests are effectively represented to Government and broader society".
Mr John Fitzgerald, chief executive of the Bridge Project which carries out child protection work on behalf of social services in the UK, rejected a suggestion from the floor that children make false allegations of sexual abuse. Where children seem to have made false allegations what has happened is that adults have misinterpreted what the children said, according to Mr Fitzgerald.
He referred to a case "which has saddened me greatly" of a boy who had been removed from his family five years ago because "everyone believed he had made an allegation of sexual abuse" against his father.
When consulted on the case at the time, the Bridge Project pointed out that the boy had never actually said he was being sexually abused but was complaining of a bowel problem. But it has taken five years for the social services to accept this and to return him to his family, he said.