Chronic neglect cases are among the most difficult for social work teams to get to grips with.

There is always the hope that things will improve – the very lack of routine and consistency in the lifestyles of these families makes the decision to take children into care a difficult call.

As one social worker interviewed by the inquiry into the Roscommon child abuse case said, he was always hopeful, never optimistic.

That seems to have been the mindset within the social work and family support services that dealt with this family.

They were always hopeful that, at some stage along the 15 years during which they drifted along with this family, that, bad as things were, something would turn up.

They were always there to offer ad hoc supports, of which there were plenty. But despite the evidence of their own eyes – the lice, the mice, the indescribable dirt, the alcohol, the filthy nappies, the state of the toilets, the stench in the bedrooms – the chaotic state of the social work services itself prevented intervention with the degree of professionalism the children deserved.

If the HSE report, chaired with such clarity by Barnardos' Norah Gibbons, is a harrowing story of the dysfunction of these neglected children's lives, it is equally a day-by-day, month-by-month, year-upon-year chronology of the sheer incompetence and systemic disarray within the social services in this area.

This inquiry exposes their many, many failures. The damning list is long. Case conferences, which should have been important milestones in the care programme mapped out for these children, which should have produced targeted plans which could then have been assessed for their success or failure, were less than coherent and rarely attended by all the professionals who should have been involved.

The care team was ignorant of the legal action they could have taken.

Social workers were poorly organised. Case notes were sometimes missing or were patchy and at times indecipherable. Social workers did not challenge the parents' excuses often enough. If anything, they pandered to them. The dirtier the house became, the more the home help cleaned it up. The more the refuse built up because the father said it was "too expensive" to have it collected, the more skips were ordered. The urgency of the case, which should have been evident to anyone with eyes and common sense, did not strike them forcibly enough.

Decisions were long-fingered, and having been delayed for so long, rarely followed through.

What is particularly alarming is that it all happened against a background of intense debate about the role of social workers and child protection. The Kelly Fitzgerald report into the death of the Kilkenny 15-year-old who was physically abused and starved, led to what was thought to have been a transformative report with recommendations very similar to those being made by the Roscommon inquiry. The McColgan case had been all over the news. The new Children First guidelines were published while these children were suffering. This was an age of enlightenment as far as child protection was concerned.

How wrong that turned out to be.

Accountability has been demanded. Those responsible deserve to be held to account. The parents have been jailed for their neglect and abuse. The inquiry report should help a renewal and a restoration of trust if its recommendations are acted upon. Though all care workers are anonymous, it does not flinch in pointing to where mistakes were made and who was responsible. Where necessary, HSE personnel involved must be disciplined.

The Minister for Children has already agreed to appoint a national director for child protection with a clinical team. He assures us that 200 social workers will be appointed without delay. The task of this new director must be the immediate and radical reorganisation of child protection services, a job which should be done transparently and rigorously across the country. As we report today, another child abuse case is due soon, this time involving an abusive Galway family with seven children. As more of these cases emerge from the past, the HSE needs to be able to show quickly and clearly that new structures are now working today.

And despite what some argue, a children's rights amendment to the constitution is a priority. The most shocking finding of all was that, until one of the children actually asked to go into care, and the children "rescued themselves", nobody thought to talk to them about what was really happening. Had the children had equal rights under our constitution, a very different mindset both to their plight and their right to "a voice" would have prevailed.

As the inquiry's chairperson, Norah Gibbons, said: "Children cannot wait indefinitely".