The Irish people  voted recently in a referendum and gave the Irish state increased powers over families in that jurisdiction. The vote was closer than expected and one of the reasons surely was that a great number of people had concerns about how much trust could be placed in the judgement and competence of the state’s child-care agencies. They did not know then what was going to be revealed about these agencies when they get caught up in the kind of  ideology which has gripped Rotherham Council in the neighbouring jurisdiction of Great Britain. Had they done so the vote might have swung the other way.

The Rotherham story, in a nutshell, is this: Three small children are removed from their foster home because the couple taking excellent care of them hold political views that social workers say make them unable to meet the youngsters’ “cultural and ethnic needs”. The children, we are told by  council, are now “safe and well, unaware of what’s happening around them”.

Allison Pearson in today’s Daily Telegraph doesn’t put a tooth in it. “That’s a lie” she says. “A comforting, callous, official lie. To remove a baby and her brother and sister from their biological parents is awful, but in dire circumstances it is the lesser evil. To settle the children in a foster home is hard, but possible, particularly when the foster mum is a nursery nurse in her fifties with years of experience. But to snatch them from that loving home a mere eight weeks later is so cruel, so stupid and so damaging that the people who made that decision should be removed from their jobs with the same haste that the infants were taken from their carers.”

This kind of ideology is viral and it is riddled with the kind of deception which Pearson points her finger at in Rotherham. The Irish people would be very naive to think that they are in some way immune from infection by this ideology or these lies. A look at the deceptions pouring out from the pro-abortion activists and their shameful abuse of the memory of Savita Halappanavar in their campaign to bring abortion on demand into the country shows only too clearly how deep the infection has already penetrated. They may live to regret the weakening of the institution of the family which they have just now conceded to. They are about to review their Constitution and for this infected element in the body politic this is going to be a further opportunity to try to bring their country on a short road to social and moral ruin.