Human Rights in Ireland

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 »

The blog authors are organising an event in Druid Theatre, Galway on 10 December this year, to mark Human Rights Day. The event is tentatively called Human Rights in Ireland: A People’s History and is somewhat modelled on The People Speak – the documentary based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The event will involve actors and non-actors alike, reading aloud excerpts from texts celebrating key moments which shaped human rights discourse in Ireland (whether on a personal or societal level). We are particularly interested in texts which relate to personal experiences and understandings of human rights, or indeed, violations of rights.

As we are currently putting together a script for the event, we welcome suggestions from you, the readers, for texts which you think are significant and relate to people’s experiences of human rights. Texts from a broad range of sources will be used – books, film, audio recordings, archival material, etc. We are particularly interested in receiving suggestions of surprising or unusual texts which we might not otherwise come across. As a rule of thumb, most of the extracts selected should not exceed about 5 minutes when read aloud. About 20 extracts in all will be included in the reading, and we are reserving a quarter of these for suggestions from the blog readers – although the final decision as to whether a text is used or not will be made by the blog authors. Suggestions can be posted in the comments below, or emailed to myself, Charles O’Mahony or Deirdre Duffy – the organisers of the event. We are aiming to complete a full draft of the script by 7 September, so if you could send us suggestions by then we would appreciate it. Further information on the event will be posted in the coming weeks – so stay tuned!

HRinI is very pleased to publish this post by Dr. Karl Kitching, lecturer in education in the School of Education, University College Cork, as the last in today’s series.

The Department of Education and Skills is not responsible for the direct provision policies that have harshly circumscribed the lives of asylum-seeker children in Ireland. Nor is it responsible for the ongoing police profiling of particular migrants. It did not help introduce laws which criminalise nomadism always and everywhere as trespass. It did not sanction the loss of a Minister of State responsible for integration (itself a contestable idea) after the 2011 election. It has not initially contributed to ESRI findings pre-recession that new migrant students are overrepresented in disadvantaged schools (a finding that has been politically inverted to assume they should ‘raise expectations’ for Irish working class students) and that black migrants are nine times more likely to be unemployed than Irish nationals.

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As part of the blognival ‘Thoughts on a New Ireland’, HRinI is thrilled to publish this post by Dr. Tracey Skillington, School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork

The contemporary moral ethical relationship to recently disclosed episodes of clerical abuse is centred on the imperative of justice and human rights recognition. However, justice was not always the priority when dealing with allegations of clerical abuse. The presence of certain conditions of possibility, including those created by the transforming activities of social, legal and political change agents have made the act of confronting injuries in the past more tenable. Official inquiries, including the more recently published Cloyne report  (July, 2011) have opened up critical spaces of argumentation and deliberation, as well as a somewhat painful departure from collective historical self. In the past, a supportive network of legitimate authority systematically denied any knowledge that abuse was occurring. The point at which this society finally gained access to the ‘unsayable’ was when a socially recognized process of witnessing violence began to make clear that clerical abuse, although horrifying, was, in fact, endemic. Read Full Post »

HRinI is thrilled to include this piece by Prof. Peadar Kirby from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick

A broad survey of the dominant meanings of social equality over the past century might well conclude that the concept has had two mutually exclusive meanings. For most of the 20th century, equality was interpreted as bridging the gap between rich and poor, namely the aspiration to a far greater level of material equality than had ever been achieved. This motivated the broad socialist tradition and resulted in some of the most equal societies that have been achieved through public policy.

The neoliberal turn in public policy from the 1980s onwards, however, went hand in hand with a concerted attack on this ideal of equality from a group of thinkers collectively known as the anti-egalitarians. Read Full Post »

Human Rights in Ireland is now two years old. To celebrate, we have invited guest posts from a set of scholars from outside ‘the law school’. The theme is “Thoughts on a New Ireland”. As the first of today’s posts, HRinI is very pleased to present this post by Christopher T. Whelan (School of Sociology and Geary Institute, UCD) and Helen Russell and Bernard Maitre (ESRI) .

A frequent refrain, during recent debates relating to the cuts in public expenditure and increased taxation has been the need to “protect the vulnerable”. Where the focus is on particular socio-economic groups, however, there appears to be very little consensus regarding which groups are to be included under this heading. Attention can shift from older people to children, from the low-paid to the unemployed from lone parents to people with a disability. The amount of time each group is on stage appears to be influenced as much by their capacity to mobilise public opinion as the objective merits of their particular case.

If economic vulnerability is understood as involving a high risk profiles over time in relation to poverty, subjective economic stress and, most particularly, exclusion from customary standards of living. Read Full Post »