The new Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald, has said that she will “examine the differences” between the wordings for a children’s rights referendum produced by the Government in January and the wording produced by an All Party Oireachtas committee last year.

Ms Fitzgerald, who is the first Cabinet level Minister for Children told RTE’s Morning Ireland that she did not have a preference between the two wordings at this stage, and would come to a decision in the next few weeks.

The wording produced by the Oireachtas Committee, chaired by former Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke, included a reference to a child’s best interests, and proposed replacing the current reference to the inalienable rights of the family.

A number of experts have warned that this term could be used in such a way as to make intervention by the State in family life too easy.

It is also understood that both the Department of Justice and the Department of Health worried that Committee’s wording would expose the State to large liabilities before the courts.

The newest version of the amendment, agreed between the AG’s office and the office of the Minister for State for Children shortly before the election, was criticised by children’s charities such as Barnardos.

Ms Fitzgerald said that she “would like to see all-party agreement” on the referendum. She said that it was important that “the public understand very clearly what is intended, that there isn’t any misapprehension about it”.

She said she believed that the public misunderstood the proposal. The referendum, she said was about “supporting children….enhancing families by having an emphasis on children’s rights in the Constitution”.

However, a range of legal and social commentators have warned that the wording proposed by the Oireachtas committee last year has a number of possible pitfalls.

Constitutional expert and recently appointed High Court judge Gerard Hogan said that the phrase “best interests of the child” could be ambiguous.

Everyone, he said, was in favour of the best interests of the child, but, he asked, “who is going to decide what is in the best of the child, and how is this going to be done?”

He told RTE last year: “We’re all in favour of the best interests of the child, and there is something of a mother and apple pie dimension to this. But in practical terms you have to ask yourself, when you’re talking about the best interests of the child, who is going to decide what is in the best of the child, and how is this going to be done? And if you’re talking about the State vindicating the rights of the child, you have to remember that this is likely to be officialdom, or some judge making this decision.

Another Trinity lecturer, Dr Oran Doyle, expressed misgivings about the wording. In a speech last year, Dr Doyle said that the proposed referendum posed the question as to who would decide what the best interests of the child were and suggested that Article 42.2.3 of the wording gave a de facto answer to this question, an answer which said might entail “greatly expanded state power and greatly reduced parental autonomy”.

Ms Fitzgerald also said that her new Department would be responsible for a whole new agency responsible for child protection. She confirmed that responsibility for this would be taken away from the HSE, after a number of scandals emerged over the last number of years.

She said: “We have had report after report and indeed more reports to come that highlight the inadequacies in our child care services.

“So we believe that there should be a new way of delivering those services and we need to have new criteria about transparency about the work that’s actually been done, about the outcomes and about the kind of services that are being provided.”

She also said that her brief included childcare services, early education and “the early interventions that we make”.