The grilling that the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, got went on for six hours. The members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child were extremely well briefed by the NGOs - questions ranged from the outcome of the C case to the problems of traveller children, to the reunification of refugee Vietnamese families in Ireland.
Privately, committee members acknowledged the Irish were by no means the worst. Far from it. The Minister had turned up - unlike the Maldives, who forgot - and her officials had responded voluminously to the written questions. This was a first visit to the committee and they were not going to mess up - 15 officials from five departments accompanied Ms O'Donnell, each with his or her own expertise. Ready to pounce on the slightest promise or prevarication, almost as numerous as the official delegation, were activists from the Children's Rights Alliance and the ISPCC - the latter even brought a group of the said oppressed to make their point. The campaigners knew this was their one chance in five years - and, sure enough, the very fact of a committee hearing and the glaring light of international scrutiny produced not a bad shopping list from the Minister. But underlying much of the questioning was a huge cultural divide. "You have a patronising approach to children," the Russian member of the committee complained.
And he was not alone to comment on two profoundly different philosophies of children's welfare. "The child does not feel himself a full member of society today," Mr Yuri Kolosov, a professor of international law in Moscow, insisted. The chairwoman of the committee, Ms Sandra Mason, a Barbados magistrate, made the point too. The submissions by the Irish "lacked the sense of the children as people".
There was a lot of talk of protection of children, she said, but not enough of their empowerment. "In terms of the participation of children in the formulation of these policies, it seems to be missing," she said. The Swedish representative, Ms Lisbet Palme, a distinguished psychologist and widow of Mr Olof Palme, insisted this was precisely why it was not appropriate to prioritise a social services inspectorate ahead of the creation of an Ombudsman for Children.
The latter, with its emphasis on letting children speak for themselves, would "open other windows", she said, appealing to the Government to think again. Ms O'Donnell acknowledged the problem. She argued that the reality of having to deal with the crisis of sexual abuse meant that welfare had to come before rights. But she promised to press the issue on the Minister on her return.
Ms Judith Karp, Israel's deputy Attorney General, asked how Ireland could have the second-highest level of child poverty in Europe but the fastest growth in the Union.
Ms Mason expressed bewilderment at the logic of the Government's position that it could not afford to raise the age of criminal responsibility above 10 because of social-service cost implications. And South Africa's Ms Queen Mokhuane, head of clinical psychology at the Medical University of South Africa, demanded to know what the Government was doing to stop the press referring to children as "illegitimate".
The Minister, six hours into questioning, pointed across at The Irish Times and suggested she take it up with him.
. The Minister for State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, was yesterday defending Ireland's record on children's rights in front of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
The 10-member committee, established to monitor the implementation of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, examines reports from member-states and accepts evidence from NGOs.
The process culminates in a hearing in Geneva after which the committee will draft its conclusions. Ireland, which ratified the convention in 1993, is the 88th country to be examined out of 191 signatories
Eight of the committee members, elected in their own right, were present yesterday. They were from Barbados, South Africa, Sweden, Italy, Burkina Faso, Russia, Brazil, and Israel.