Letter to the Editor

Supreme Court’s Justice Hardiman’s summing up of the existing constitutional preference for parents – as disinct from social workers, priests etc. – as the guardian and enablers of children’s rights provides the key to where we differ. [2]

As a part-time academic and full time mother, now grandmother, I question the benefit of what the UN’s 1994/5 Publications Catalogue refers to as this “ new concept of separate rights for children with the Government accepting responsibility of protecting the child from the power of parents”. My concern, amply expressed by Justice Hardiman, is with the inevitable diluting of the parental stewardship of their children that fully integrating CRC’s articles would entail.

Rather than engage the voluminous academic discourse around children’s rights, it must suffice in this brief response to draw attention to the two days that Ursula Kilkelly and I spent alongside one another in the UN Palais de Nations in Geneva. We were there to observe the large Irish government delegation being confronted by the UN Monitoring Committee. Under examination was our progress in making CRC law and policy. The committee was upfront in clarifying its revolutionary impact: CRC was not about protecting children, but with making them autonomous, giving children an independent voice. Both the government delegation and the monitoring committee were in agreement that Bunreacht na hÉireann is an obstacle to the change necessary to incoporate CRC fully .[3]

That was 1998. Since then the infrastructure has been put in place, law policy and provision are being reformed in line the UN’s new concept of children’s rights, but the threat of a constitutional challenge remains.

There is a strong, powerfully-represented lobby arguing that justice requires that our consciousness should be raised to the pitch where the unity of the family will be sacrified to a vision of equality. Perhaps the time has come for pro-UN children’s rights groups, such as those gathered under the Alliance for Children – groups that are channels for the funding of both government and wealthy philantrophies – to ask themselves the real question. What kind of civilization will emerge when, as our Constitution is dismantled, the glue that holds society together has been hollowed out and replaced by power relations?

Elizabeth Ledwidge

Notes:  

[1]     A quick read, CRC is available at http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/k2crc.htm

[2]     Supreme Court Record Number: 273 & 283/06, 13^th November 2006. BAILII Databases Supreme Court of Ireland Decisions URL: http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IESC/2006/S60.html

[3]     UNCRC (1998) Committee on the Rights of the Child, CRC/C/SR.436-8.