Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald has said she hopes a children’s referendum will be held before the end of the year.

Speaking at the launch of the new National Children’s Strategy, Minister Fitzgerald said the Government will decide soon on the wording and clarification of the referendum.

The Minister said she needed to examine the wording of a children’s referendum, but believed it should take place this year.

She has already said she will study two proposed referendum wordings, one proposed by an Oireachtas committee last year, and one produced by the outgoing Government in January.

Ms Fitzgerald told RTE’s Morning Ireland earlier this month that she would “examine the differences” between the wordings.

The wording produced by the Oireachtas Committee, chaired by former Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke, did include 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 Attorney General’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.

Barnardos, and the Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan, have said they want to see the phrase “best interests of the child” included in the legislation.

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?”

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”.