In a harrowing interview, Geraldine Fitzgerald, a younger sister of Kelly, who died in 1993, aged 15, after persistent neglect by her parents in Co Mayo, told how she too had been physically and emotionally abused by their parents since she was five years old. She said she was left to sleep outside the back door with the family's dogs, deprived of food and beaten daily by her father.

Minister for children Brian Lenihan said her story was proof that the proposed referendum on children's rights was urgently needed and that he was willing to reopen the Fitzgerald case.

"Your heart goes out to them, " said Dr John Hillery, consultant psychiatrist and Medical Council president, reacting to Geraldine Fitzgerald's story. "It seems amazing that two girls were being abused like that and nobody seemed to notice. It's shocking, but I would have seen children like that in practice as a child psychiatrist. The referendum on the rights of the child should be followed up but there is more that needs to be done."

He recommends a network of multi-disciplinary units, which he likens to medical crash teams, available roundthe-clock, seven days a week, who would respond immediately to concerns about family welfare. The teams would consist of an array of complementary health and child-protection personnel, established on a regional basis, who would provide the initial and long-term contacts for children at risk.

"There is a sense of fear around this whole area and we have to ensure we get past that. We get into our bunkers but what we have to do is take the paranoia out of it. At the moment, families feel they are having their children taken away from them and professionals feel they'll be attacked whatever they do.

"Teams like these would be available for people to talk confidentially to them and allow people to come forward so that they could then make discreet inquires. They would need to be resourced and trained in child protection so that they could make an urgent assessment of a situation and develop a followup strategy. Something like this would have been relevant too in that awful case in Wexford recently, " he added, referring to the deaths of the Dunne family in Monageer.

"I had a negative response myself in dealing with the system on behalf of a patient so how bad must it be for people who are not used to dealing with the system?"

wondered the Senate candidate, who is stepping down from the presidency of the Medical Council to contest the election.

Family-law expert Geoffrey Shannon also responded to Geraldine Fitzgerald's story, saying it was evidence, once again, of how children are treated as invisible in childprotection bureaucracy because of their constitutional second-class citizenship.

"The family can be a dangerous place for a child to be, " he said. "The constitution puts parents before children, as we saw in the Baby Ann adoption case. In Geraldine's case, she was the principal stakeholder in an adult-centred system and her voice was never heard." He proposed that specialised judges be trained to deal with child-protection cases.

Geraldine Fitzgerald's story elicited a shocked and sympathetic response from readers. One member of the public has pledged a donation of Euro200 to help alleviate her financial problems.