As they approached immigration control, the group split into two. The first group encountered no problems with the normally vigilant immigration authorities. The eight girls and five adult women declared themselves to be Girl Guides and their leaders who had come all the way from Kenya to attend an international jamboree in Co Meath. Accreditation papers, visas and paperwork were all in order and the girls were waved through.

The second Kenyan party of four adult women and four girls were not so lucky. They told immigration officials they were in Ireland to attend an event organised by the Irish Hospice Foundation.

The authorities were sceptical. Their visas were in order, but their reasons for being in the country raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, they were allowed through to their accommodation in a B&B on Gardiner Street in Dublin's inner city, while detectives checked out their story.

Unknown to the group, they were kept under surveillance. When one of the women, Polly Mbugua, 40, left the B&B the next day, she was stopped by gardai and found to have a plastic bag full of counterfeit Scottish children's identity cards in the names of various children. Mrs Mbugua was arrested.

Although suspicious, officers could not directly link Mrs Mbugua with the other Kenyan contingent -- which was by now ensconced at Camp le Cheile, the week-long jamboree on the grounds of Tattersall's bloodstock complex in Ratoath.

Immigration officials interviewed the Girl Guide leaders and kept an eye on the girls -- the youngest of whom was 11 -- over the following week. This was all disturbing to the Irish Girl Guides, which -- given the ages of their young charges -- imposed strict security and vetting procedures for the event.

When the festivities ended, the organisers made a point of ensuring that all the little Kenyan girls got on the bus to take them back to Dublin and to their flight home. Days later, the Irish Girl Guides rang to check that the Kenyan children had returned home safely and were assured that they had. In fact, they had only made it as far as a B&B on Gardiner Street in Dublin, before apparently vanishing with their minders in to the ether.

Were a party of Irish school girls to disappear in such circumstances, there would be uproar. But the fate of the missing Kenyan girls didn't even hit the media until a fortnight ago.

Ten months after they went missing, a conference on child trafficking was told -- wrongly -- that they had disappeared while in the care of the Health Services Executive; that they could have been trafficked into the sex industry; and that little had been done to find them and the other missing 388 immigrant children who had vanished from State care in the past seven years.

The truth of their fate proved more prosaic. The Kenyan group's clandestine flight involved neither sexual exploitation nor enforced labour. Gardai claim all the evidence suggests that the Kenyan girls were using Ireland to get into Britain to be reunited with families and relatives. The Scottish youth identity cards, found on Polly Mbugua, would have allowed travel between both countries. Mbugua, who runs a travel agency in Nairobi and is herself a mother of two, is now serving three years in jail.

In the past 10 months, most of the girls have been traced. A small number are in the care of health authorities here and in the UK. Some have been "claimed" by parents. Two girls who were thought to have been teenage sisters were actually mother and daughter.

Three children are still missing, their fate officially unknown. And there, according to lobby groups, is the cause for concern. Unicef estimates that 1.2 million children are being trafficked every year to fill a demand for cheap labour or sexual exploitation. They are plucked from impoverished countries, with children and their families often unaware of the dangers, believing that better employment and lives lie ahead.

But what evidence is there to suggest that Ireland is a destination for unscrupulous traffickers?

As in the case of the Kenyan girls, gardai claim that the vast majority of suspected cases of child trafficking investigated so far have turned out to be children dispatched from their home countries to be reunited with their relatives abroad. In some cases, they are the children of other families, dispatched to emigrant families for a chance of a better life.

THERE may not be much hard evidence, but what little there is is alarming. Two years ago, social workers highlighted the case of a 15-year-old Somali girl who had been rescued from a brothel, after she was trafficked into the country. She was put into a privately run hostel in Dublin, where social workers asked for more staff to keep an eye on her. Their requests were refused and the Somali girl ran away. The fate of this girl, who would now be about 17, is not known.

In a separate case, a 17-year-old Nigerian girl who came to Ireland as an unaccompanied minor ran away from HSE care in Dublin and was found six months later when gardai raided a brothel in Sligo.

There are other cases, too, where children fall beneath the radar of the authorities entirely.

Three years ago, a 16-year-old African girl claimed she had been trafficked from her village at the age of 12 and forced into prostitution in a number of countries before being brought to Ireland, where she was effectively enslaved in a house in Louth. Gardai stumbled upon her case.

Most disturbing, however, was the almost accidental discovery last September that an African man arrested for traffic offences in Drogheda was in fact one of the biggest suspected child traffickers in Europe. Peter Kwame Sarfo, 38, from Sierra Leone, was wanted by Dutch authorities for allegedly trafficking children from Africa to Europe, where they were then forced into prostitution.

His extradition hearing in Dublin in January heard how he had allegedly arranged for young girls from Nigeria to travel to the Netherlands alone and seek asylum. When there, they were put into care homes, from which Sarfo and others would allegedly spirit them away to work as prostitutes in Spain and Italy.

Sarfo's arrest and extradition to Holland was a big coup for the international authorities and prompted gardai to set up Operation Snow, focusing on the trafficking of children into Ireland. So far, the dozens of investigations into missing children have failed to turn up evidence that children were trafficked into Ireland by Sarfo and his gang. Gardai believe that he was using Ireland as a base from which to regularise his immigrant status and may not have wanted to blot his copy book here.

But if Sarfo is not trafficking children into Ireland, it appears that some other gang is. Proof is offered by Ruhama, an outreach organisation working with women involved in prostitution.

In a van that cruises the streets at night, project workers offer hot drinks and a safe place to talk for those who want it. The women they have encountered include a small number of girls in their mid-teens who were trafficked into the country as unaccompanied minors. They were placed in the care of the HSE, put into hostels, and then either absconded or were lured away. Ruhama has referred those cases to gardai.

"We have come into contact with a number of people in their mid-teens and we have referred them on to the authorities," said Geraldine Rowley of Ruhama. "They are a very small number, but I can confirm that we have come in contact with minors who were trafficked in as unaccompanied minors."

John O'Driscoll, a superintendent with the Garda National Immigration Bureau, confirmed that it is investigating the cases.

"We have cases referred to us by Ruhama involving minors that we are currently investigating and that have the potential to reveal that children have been trafficked for exploitation."

Dispatching children as unaccompanied minors to land alone in European airports -- as Sarfo allegedly did -- is now a commonly recognised mechanism for getting children into a country.

Because they are minors alone and seeking asylum, they will not be deported but instead placed into the care of the HSE. While their asylum applications are being processed, children are put into foster care or children's homes if they are under 16 and hostels if they are older.

Currently, 154 children aged 16 to 18 and in the care of the HSE are living in seven privately owned hostels dotted around Dublin.

The HSE says it is in the process of phasing out the hostels for older children. The HSE and the Department of Justice paid €4.9m last year to the owners of these privately run hostels.

While in HSE care, the children are assigned a social worker and are enrolled in a local school. One teacher in a Dublin school who teaches a number of these children described them as eager and keen to learn. She does not ask how and why they came to be in the country.

"They don't talk about their personal lives and I don't ask them. I try and respect their privacy," she said. She wonders whether they will turn up next year.

The children are given a weekly allowance of €19.10 -- a figure that has not changed in at least three years -- and a once-off €150 payment for clothes. When school trips and other outings come up, the children must put in a request for extra money from their social worker.

Last year, 32 children ran away from these hostels and 53 the year before that. The HSE regards it as a sign of progress that, so far this year, only one child has gone missing from them.