One of the country’s leading family law experts and children’s rights advocates has said that a children’s rights amendment to the Constitution would not have prevented the Roscommon abuse case.

Geoffrey Shannon (pictured), the Government’s Special Rapporteur for Child Protection, was reacting to a report into the HSE’s handling of a case involving six children who were systematically abused or neglected by their parents over a period of 15 years.

The report found that the HSE did not act in time to protect the children.

A number of politicians, including Fine Gael spokesman for children, Charlie Flanagan and Labour Senator Alex White, said that the report, drawn up by a Government appointed committee, demonstrated the need for a referendum.

However, speaking on RTE Radio’s Morning Ireland programme, Mr Shannon said that all of the legislation needed to protect them was already in place.

He said: “I heard yesterday people making reference to the fact that if we had a referendum, this case would have been decided differently. I respectfully disagree.”

He said that the Child Care Act 1991 allowed social workers to apply for an order to the District Court to allow them to monitor children that they believe are at risk of abuse.

Speaking in the wake of the publication of the report yesterday, Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, chief executive of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said it confirmed “the necessity to enshrine the Rights of the Child in our Constitution”.

Fine Gael children’s spokesperson Charlie Flanagan echoed calls for the Constitution to be amended to include the protection of vulnerable children.

“This again illustrates the need for a referendum on amending the Irish Constitution to enshrine children’s rights and, as the report says, ’ensure that the voice of the child is heard when courts are considering the matters that affect them’,” he said.

“I believe that the Constitution in its present format does not fully recognise this painful reality and that is why a referendum giving children greater legal rights and protections is necessary.”

Labour senator Alex White, the party’s children’s spokesman, said a referendum was needed urgently.

Last year, a range of organisations involved in child advocacy, in urging the Government to hold a children’s rights referendum, asserted that the Roscommon case demonstrated the need for such a referendum.

In a statement signed by representatives of Barnardos, the Rape Crisis Network, One in Four and the Children’s Right Alliance, it was suggested that the case illustrated “the need for children to be fully protected and their voices to be heard by all authorities and within the court system” by means of a Constitutional amendment.

Mr Shannon also said that there was a need for a “new era” of accountability within the system. He said that the term “systems failure” to describe what had happened in the case annoyed him.

Such terms, he said, meant nothing unless lessons were learned by the HSE. A range of reports showed that authorities hadn’t learned from mistakes in the past.

Also speaking on RTE Six One News, Bernard Gloster, Local Health Manager of HSE West, said the Executive fully accepted the findings of the report.

He said the possibility of dismissals on the back of the report would be examined.

He also said that the HSE took very seriously the need to listen to the voices of children in similar situations in the future.

He said that he accepted that this was an aspect of the case highlighted by the report.

The HSE was “taking absolutely additional and immediate steps to ensure that all of our practice guidance to our professionals seeks to correct that,” Mr Gloster said.

He added that the report pointed to the fact “that in a number of the formal meetings around which plans for this family were discussed, that there would have been diversions away from what would have been the views of the children to the views of the parents”.