Human Rights in Ireland

Following tonight’s successful performance of Whoop it up for Liberty! in Druid Theatre, Galway we would like to share the texts from which extracts were chosen and included in the performance. This link will bring you to a google document which contains the original, full extracts, which have been modified for use in tonight’s performance. It also links the documents to their original source, if available online, and, where relevant, contains links to the images which we feel connect with the pieces chosen for the performance. Thanks again to everyone for supporting this project – we hope we have made a contribution to the open democratic arts, and to exploring further some aspects of Ireland’s human rights history. The performance has been recorded, and we hope to share some clips from the recording with you in the near future.

Many thanks to everyone who supported our funding efforts for Whoop it up for Liberty! Thanks to your support, we reached our funding target and are well on our way to producing this exciting performance in Druid Theatre, Galway on 10 December. Rehearsals are gearing up, and we have an amazing mix of people with personal experience of rights-violations, professional actors, and community activists involved in the performance.

We released many of the tickets for this event to those who donated to the project on Fund It, however, there are still a limited number of tickets available to anyone who would like to attend the performance in Galway on 10 December. The venue is fully accessible, and there will be a hearing loop provided at the performance. We are currently looking into providing other accessibility features, and would like for anyone who is interested in attending to let us know what their requirements are, and we will do our best to ensure that the performance is inclusive and accessible to all, within the constraints of our budget.

To reserve your ticket for the performance, contact Liam Thornton, and if you have specific accessibility requirements, you can contact me. We will be recording the performance on the night and will hope to make the recording available online afterwards – and will also publish the script of the performance on the blog after the performance.

We are delighted to welcome this second guest post from Anne Neylon. Anne is a PhD candidate at University College Cork. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.

On October 31^st last, eighteen year old Angolan Mauro Manuel, who arrived in the Netherlands aged 10 as a separated child seeking asylum was told by the Dutch parliament that he may not remain in the state now that he is an adult. Although Mauro Manuel now sees the Netherlands as the only state with which he identifies, this attachment has not been deemed sufficient to allow him to stay on an indefinite basis. The case of Mauro Manuel raises questions about what citizenship really means and how the advance of globalization has acted to challenge the way in which one’s identity and ability to acquire citizenship is constructed.

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Increasing attention has focused, in recent years, on the role of religion in public education in Ireland, and on its implications for equality and human rights. Rather than providing public education directly, the Irish state has historically “provided for” free education, at primary and secondary levels, by recognising and funding schools under the ownership and management of religious denominations. Therefore, even today, more than 90% of primary schools in the Republic are operated according to a Roman Catholic ethos – the consequence of this being, for families in many areas of the State, that there may effectively me little choice but to attend a school committed to the inculcation of Catholic beliefs. This is problematic notwithstanding the explicit constitutional right to withdraw from formally-timetabled religious instruction classes.[1] Yet the paradox of this state of affairs lies in the fact that formally and constitutionally, the Ireland is (arguably, or at least for most purposes) a non-sectarian state; religious discrimination and the “endowment” of religion are constitutionally prohibited, and the democratic principle of freedom of parental choice in matters of religious education, although riven with ambiguity, is consensually regarded as the cardinal constitutional precept.

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 As announced in August, the Human Rights in Ireland blog will host a performance on 10 December at 6pm in Druid Theatre, Galway to celebrate Human Rights Day. The event is called 'Whoop it up for Liberty!' - an ironic quote from Connolly's Reconquest of Ireland. As part of the performance, actors, local people and community activists will read aloud from texts commemorating key moments in Irish history which relate to the theme of human rights. The performance will feature first person narratives which highlight the experiences of workers, women, people with disabilities, travellers, language rights activists, asylum seekers, children, prisoners and many others as they relate to human rights in Ireland – from historical perspectives right through to the present day. Thomas Conway, literary manager of Druid Theatre, will direct the performance, which will be followed by a question and answer session where the texts and themes will be further discussed.
 

Since this is a not-for-profit event, we are seeking support to cover our production costs. The director and actors involved are generously volunteering their time, and in order to do justice to the inspiring texts used to create the script, we would like to make this as professional an event as possible. The event has been listed as a creative venture on Fund It to secure crowd source funding for the performance. This link will take you to the Fund It page for the event where you can watch a video clip of some of the actors involved reading from a draft script - and we would appreciate if readers of the blog could repost the link via social media. Donations received will go towards the cost of hiring the venue and rehearsal space, lighting and sound, recording the performance, providing catering for the cast and crew after the performance, producing programme notes for the event, and making the performance accessible to all.

 

This will be the first time an event of this kind has been performed in Ireland, using first-person narratives to explore historical and present-day experiences of human rights across a broad range of issues: identity, belonging, democracy, politics, solidarity, and exclusion. We hope that people will contribute what they can to make the event a success – and we hope to see as many of you as possible on 10th December in Galway!

Tomorrow, Ireland will have its human rights record reviewed under the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedure. Last December, Danielle Kennan and I hosted a blog-symposium that considered some aspects of Ireland’s human rights record in areas such as the role of civil society in informing the UN Human Rights Council of potential human rights issues in Ireland, the rights of children and the rights of prisoners. Since this symposium, there has been engagement by government and non-governmental organisations with wider society on problematic areas of Irish law that may not meet international minimum human rights protection standards. The final Irish UPR Report can be accessed here, while the UN summary of civil society submissions can be viewed here.

Rights Now will be live streaming Ireland’s UPR examination by the UN Human Rights Council from 8.00 am on Thursday, 06 October 2011. For those in and around Dublin, Rights Now will be hosting a breakfast viewing of Ireland’s UPR Review from 8 am in Liberty Hall, Dublin.  In Cork, NASC, the Irish Immigrant Support Centre, will be hosting a viewing (as well as their open day) over coffee from 8 am in Mary Street. In Limerick, Doras Luimní will be hosting a viewing of Ireland’s UPR examination from 8am.

I do stand by the comments I made last December: Read Full Post »

We are pleased to welcome this guest post from Dr. Karl Kitching, lecturer in the School of Education at University College, Cork.

There’s no mistaking a rightist Hook when it lands. It has become par for the course to describe ‘socialist’ Dáil deputies in a derogatory way. But ‘atheist’, George? From the same man who argued in the Irish Times on Tuesday September 20th that private schools are more inclusive than others because they were the first to allow Jewish students to enrol?

Let’s clear up a few of the problems with Tuesday’s pillow talk with private schools of the world, before exposing a more important contemporary myth: that there is actually a ‘private versus public’ debate to be had with regard to education in Ireland.

The biggest problem with George Hook’s defense of private schooling is that it was a solo run, so to speak. It is based on his own individual experience, and takes no account of how schooling quality and equality have dramatically changed in Ireland and internationally in the intervening period. Few would dismiss George’s own positive experience of school. But his ‘defence’ is hugely outdated, individualised and romanticised. As far as I am aware, George attended school before the advent of mass second level education. There were few alternatives to private (religious-run) schools during his time.

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It has been reported that a couple are seeking to sue their child’s former national school for breach of their constitutional rights in respect of religious and moral education. Their complaint is that the Co. Wicklow school did not properly accommodate the constitutional right of the child to be excluded from religious instruction.  The school allowed the child to be picked up early so as to avoid religious instruction classes, but the Irish Times reports that “the couple’s demands would have excluded the saying of grace before meals, prayers before or after class, nativity plays and carol singing because their child could not be left unsupervised.”  Essentially, their claim appears to be that the Constitution protects parents’ rights to shield children from unwanted religious doctrines and influences beyond the formal confines of timetabled religious instruction classes. Read Full Post »

We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Noelin Fox.  Noelin is a Ph.D candidate in the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, NUI Galway.  Her research examines the right to independent living provided for in Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of with Disabilities.  Noelin has worked for many years in intellectual disability services’ in Ireland.

This month, my daughter, like thousands of her peers across the country, is moving away from home for the first time.  She is 18 years old and is taking up her place in college, embarking on her journey to independence.  Over the coming months she will have to learn a whole array of new skills which she has no previous experience of.  She will have to manage her (limited) budget, feed herself properly, learn to live with people who are not her immediate family, manage the academic work she is assigned, deal with the bank, figure out bus time-tables, forge new friendships and a whole array of other tasks.  In the process she may well make mistakes.  She may submit work late for college, spend too much money on going out leaving herself short at the end of the week, get involved in unwise relationships, among many things.  Hopefully she will learn from such mistakes and manage better the next time.  Throughout this process she will have plenty of support – from us her parents, from the school-friends she is living with and from new friends – and if she gets her heart broken or bruised we will take care of her until she heals and help to her move on.  The college too is well attuned to the needs of in-coming first years – it has good structures in place to ease them into college life and help ensure they progress through their first encounters with third level academic studies.

How different all this would all be if she had a disability, especially if she had an intellectual disability.  Would she be leaving home at all at this stage of her life at all?  Probably not – Read Full Post »

The Response of the Holy See to Ireland is a dense document defined as much by its omissions as by its technical terminology. Here, I want to evaluate its engagement with the central issue: the degree to which the bureaucratic architecture of the Church facilitated or failed to tackle abuse, by omission, by cultural practice and political pressure. The latter three categories are carefully used. It is clear from the response that the Holy See would like the discussion to relate to formal authority: the authority to take decisions (seen as belonging to local bishops), the authority to bind (something denied to relevant documents). For them, illegitimate interference with Ireland’s domestic affairs, requires an order/directive rather than negligence/omission/insensitive practice on their part. It reviews its actions according to administrative process, not in terms of its obligations to provide, and collaborate with Ireland to ensure, effective rights protection. Read Full Post »