Electioneering with Children's Rights

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Wednesday November 08, 2006 10:14 by Miriam Cotton - Disability Election Pledge Alliance

Beware of Fiann Fail tampering with the constitution

When the leader of a political party with a track record on social policy like Fianna Fail’s starts talking about children’s rights, it’s time to sit up and be alarmed – particularly so when it is in the vicinity of a general election. Fianna Fail are a party who have perfected the art of claiming to do one thing while in fact doing its opposite. The issue of child protection should not be used as a back door through which further reductions in the rights of parents to secure adequate state services for their children is introduced.

For some time now, Fianna Fail and the PDs have been chafing under the yoke of the rights conferred on the people of Ireland under the terms of the constitution and especially at the corresponding financial and other obligations that it places on them to provide services for ordinary people. As compared, say, to the rights of foreign corporations to raid our natural resources with extraordinarily favourable tax incentives funded out of the electorate’s purse, the rights of children are not even in the same galaxy where current policy making is concerned. There are urgent questions to be answered. Will it only be parents and private individuals who will be in the firing line when they fail or abuse the children in their care? Bear in mind that child abuse is already illegal in Ireland – no change to the constitution is necessary to establish that fact. So what is really at issue here? If the government is truly willing to make itself, its agents and all public and private institutions fully accountable for their own failures then progress will definitely be made because it is within private and state-run institutions that the worst of the systematic abuses of children (and others) have occurred.

However, in the absence of any meaningful investment in services for children and the abject failure of the government’s National Children’s Strategy for the same reason, the constitution has been increasingly relied on by parents and families as the legal basis for mounting challenges to the government’s frequent and deliberate disregard for the provision of services to its own electorate. Should we be worried, then, to find Fianna Fail looking to the idea of changing the constitution in favour of an increase in state power at the expense of parents and families while dressing it up in talk of rights for children? There is justification for this suspicion – notably the introduction of the Education of Persons with Special Needs Act 2004 and the Disability Act 2005 which were trumpeted in advance by Fianna Fail as major pieces of rights legislation. Since their introduction, we have seen reductions in front line services to children around the country because under the terms of this legislation, the rights of children have been devastatingly reduced to the rights of a single government Minister to allocate resources as he personally sees fit, depending on his ideological preferences. The constitutional rights of parents to defend their children against unconstitutional state neglect have actually been taken away and the established case law which offered some protection has also, not coincidentally, been weakened. Can Fianna Fail really be taken seriously where children’s rights are concerned? So far, Sinn Fein are the only political party to promise to repeal this backward and discriminatory legislation, if they form a part of the next government. If Ian Paisely can work with Sinn Fein so can we here in the South, surely?

If Fianna Fail are serious about children’s rights they will be able to show a guaranteed investment plan for improvements in desperately needed services for Irish children. Does every child have appropriate developmental, health and educational supports as defined by their actual needs? Is the state going to invest in adequate play, recreational and open air facilities for them? What protection will it offer them against industrial and other forms of pollution to which children are particularly vulnerable? Will property and industrial developers be obliged to consider environmental effects on children and to amend or drop plans where their health would be put at risk? Will the shabby state of so many Irish schools be improved? If we don’t have a resounding yes in answer to these and other questions then we can be pretty sure that this initiative, as it relates to Fianna Fail, is simply emotive manipulation of the media and the electorate around an imprecise principle without there being any obligation on the government to do anything truly meaningful for Irish children.