There's a lot in this thread (Mary Garvey's post included) that reeks of the fascist mentality. McGrath may have worked in or around a depressingly lousy team, but I think it would have been fairer to have confined that "chickenshit" epithet to the one experience.

There have been many instances in the UK of parents being accused of child abuse, and families being torn apart and permanently wrecked in consequence, when in fact there had been no crime done at all. I remember the disgraceful community reaction to a woman in Australia who was thought - wrongly - to have murdered an infant when it had in fact been snatched by a dingo. I don't say this to suggest Ainlee's parents were sweet innocents - just to point out that it can be very hard for the professional agencies to sort out right from wrong.

Social workers face difficult decisions day in and day out, and the positive outcomes that they so often achieve go completely unheralded. Once in so many hundred cases they foul up, and the result rightly appalls us all. It may then give some halfwit a moment's gratification to blame it all on the chickenshit social workers, but if we have learnt anything in the many years since Maria Colwell, it is that firefighting the problem around the edges is no answer.

We have become a "me now" society in which no political party proposing to raise income tax has a chance of being elected. Such taxes that we do pay are on spending rather than income, with the result that the gap between rich and poor in the UK has widened spectacularly since 1979. London, where Ainlee lived and died, has some of the worst deprivation in Britain, cheek-by-jown with the most obscene wealth. Social workers spend much of their working lives amid that deprivation, doing work that would provoke extreme resentment wherever they did it (who here would welcome social workers snooping into their domestic lives?).

They are shamefully over-worked and under-resourced, like most of our public services. And in any case they would never be able to prevent every tragedy, any more than the police could ever prevent every crime; or anti-virus programs could keep a step ahead of every virus.

Even when Ainlee died, I felt much more sadness/despair than anger. But many months have passed since then, and I would have hoped that by now we would have been reacting with something more constructive than mindless blind rage.