With unfortunate, seasonal timing, the Supreme Court chose by 4:1 this week to rap their gavels on Mr Justice Peter Kelly's knuckles and mind him watch his words about troubled children.
The children's champion is silenced. What had he done? The judge acted as a father to hundreds of Irish children, showing them that authority can be loving, and laws can be just.
Kelly was the man to whom the late Kim O'Donovan wrote when she experienced difficulties in Newtown House. She trusted him and the law he observed.
After she died of a heroin overdose within weeks of escaping from care, he discovered her carers had withheld one of her letters to him. He was righteously angry.
How wrong can it be for an Irish child to believe in Irish justice? Or must they learn to be cynical at an early age? Kim's belief in justice was demonstrably unfounded, her death a warning that trust is not its own reward.
A fatal lesson, in her case. But nothing fundamental changed. There still aren't half enough childcare places, there is no children's ombudsman to advocate them, and there remains no constitutional underpinning to rank children's welfare important enough to do either. Children are second-class citizens, and some of them die because of it.
True, a photo of Bertie Ahern, John O'Donoghue, Micheβl Martin or Mary Hanafin with a couple of scruffy, homeless kids lacks a certain aura.
Politicians like Gerry Adams don't line up to carry the coffin when a troubled child dies. Over the years, such children have become bad news, and society has responded with a kind of learned helplessness that filters down to children as a lack of hope. The hopelessness is growing. The health boards declared 774 children homeless in 1999, and other estimates reckon another 300 approximately are in need of safe residential care. Numbers are increasing exponentially.
Officially, the Supreme Court judgement is not primarily about children, but about the separation of powers between legislature and judiciary. Separation of powers is essential. But what happens when the most vulnerable citizens are not fully protected by law, when their interests are subordinated to bureaucratic convenience, lack of political will and explicit flaws in article 41 of the Constitution?
Society became used to letting Kelly do its less pleasant work, and saying what needed to be said. People cheered when he took senior ministers to task for failing to deliver their own targets on childcare places. But his acts bit back at him. Judges aren't supposed to audit ministers' promises or bureaucrats' inaction; they're supposed to sit still and uphold the law.
Judges aren't supposed to be celebrities either. A judge is not making friends in high places when he gets more positive publicity than his political or judicial peers, or when his rulings can be read as implying that more than a few ministers, civil servants, public servants and health boards are not doing their job properly. Patently, they are not.
Kelly's must-do advocacy within the rule of law masked the establishment's persistent inertia when it comes to children's interests. The Government and its agents consistently put fundamental children's issues on an un-merry-go-round that keeps spinning and spinning. With Kelly restrained from acting, a line of defence for children has been lost.
The un-merry-go-round promises a children's ombudsman to blow the whistle when, for example, judges are faced with the choice of sending a troubled or homeless child who has done no wrong into either penal detention or a mental hospital. The ombudsman legislation was supposed to happen before Christmas, but is allegedly delayed because of drafting difficulties and article 41.
Changes to article 41 are allegedly delayed because no lobby (apart from the best legal imaginations, children's organisations, and other groups) exists strong enough to make it politically worthwhile. The wheels keep spinning. In any other walk of life, when things don't happen it is because people don't want them to happen. Behind the excuses lies a lack of political and bureaucratic will to make the necessary legal instruments available for children's welfare.
So many complications are raised that the hopeless and helplessness grow, and columns such as this become weighed down by detail, and possibly doomed to repetition.
In the new year, the Government faces the real prospect of being found guilty of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights because the courts sent a child to St Patrick's centre for young offenders when he had done no one and nothing wrong. For Government, read "state", and for that, read "everyone".
The Government has options. In the short term, it could do as Wales does and assign temporary responsibility to the existing Ombudsman, pending getting all the supposedly complicated stuff straight. This needs a Ministerial order from Charlie McCreevy and about five working days.
They could appoint a private-sector entrepreneur to lead a special team reporting on how to make places and staff happen within targets. Whatever they do, they must start leading, instead of following, and help troubled children feel hopeful and loved.
mruane@irish-times.ie