Throughout last October, November and most of December, children's minister Barry Andrews sat on two disturbing reports commissioned by the state which showed that our youngest citizens were in danger. And he sat, and he sat, and he sat.

In mid-summer, he received the Cloyne report by Ian Elliott, chief executive of the National Board for Safeguarding Children. It chronicled complaints of child sexual abuse against two priests in the north Cork diocese, concluding that the risk to children had been treated by church authorities as a secondary concern to the interests of the accused priests. As a consequence, children were in peril. The diocese's child protection committee, whose fitness for the role was questioned in the report, threatened to deploy civil and canon law to stop it being published. Andrews, a qualified barrister, backed off. So cowed was he that he refused to avail of parliamentary immunity by laying the report before Dáil éireann. In the end, it was the diocese that published it on 19 December, ultimately precipitating Bishop John Magee's resignation.

The second report by barrister Kate Brosnan on the murders and suicide of the Dunne family in Monageer, Co Wexford, was delivered on 6 October last. Adrian Dunne, a blind man with an intellectual function "at the upper limits of mild mental handicap", his wife Ciara, officially assessed as a slow learner, and their daughters, Shania (5) and Leanne (3), were found dead in their home on 23 April 2007. Brosnan's report notes that gardaí, alerted to a potential catastrophe in the family, drove past the house that weekend but noticed nothing untoward. Had they looked in the letter box, as one of their colleagues did the following Monday, they would have seen Adrian Dunne hanging from the ceiling in the hall. Other frightful oversights are catalogued in the report but the people of Ireland are prohibited from knowing all its recommendations because the report was published with more than half its contents censored.

When Barry Andrews released its digestible parts last Tuesday, he said that the €15m needed to provide a weekend service for mental health emergencies was not available. There was no look of shame on his face when he said this. First, nobbled by fear of litigation because, as he explained, the inquiry was not statutorily established. Then, forced to admit that child victims of suicidal killers are the collateral damage of a recession.

Neither assertion is true. Exchequer poverty has not made a weekend service unfeasible. Political indifference has. When the exchequer was dripping money, there was still none to spare for such a service. Sharon Grace walked into a hospital in Wexford in April 2005 while Ireland was busy boasting it was one of the richest countries in the world. She asked for help. None was forthcoming. It was out-of-hours for the HSE. And so she walked on down to Kaats Strand and drowned herself and her two little girls, Michaela (4) and Abby (3). At the inquest, the coroner said it was incredible that the system had still not been improved 18 months after their deaths.

There is a discernible pattern in governments' responses to these tragedies that cannot but make one wonder if a policy is being pursued to use the justification of potential litigation as a get-out-of-jail card. When Andrews's predecessor, Brian Lenihan, appointed the Monageer inquiry team, he knew its non-statutory constitution exposed it to possible lawsuits. He was already familiar with the fate of the Kelly Fitzgerald report, written by a former chief executive of Barnardos. Kelly was 15, visibly malnourished and neglected and on the at-risk register when she died in the early 1990s. Her parents went to jail for it but questions clamoured about the care the health service had given the child. The Kelly Fitzgerald report was thorough. The pity is that hardly anybody has ever seen it. A public servant who claimed it besmirched his reputation threatened to sue. It lay gathering dust on some shelf until the opposition demanded it be laid before the Oireachtas. So sneakily was it released that, to this day, if you ask in the Government Publications Office for a copy, you are likely to be told it does not exist.

If I were Norah Gibbons, Barnardos' director of advocacy who is currently inquiring for the state into the Roscommon neglect and incest case, I would be fearful. We should all be fearful because, if this charade of emasculated inquiries is not brought to a halt – either by making them statutory or by providing adequate defamation insurance for inquiry teams – people of her calibre and Kate Brosnan's will stop making themselves available.

Adrian Dunne's family wants Barry Andrews to resign over the Monageer report but that is too easy. If he wants to shed the sobriquet of worst children's minister in history, he should stay put and show some courage. There are children depending on him who could tell him how much courage it takes to survive.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie