Human Rights in Ireland

We are very pleased to feature this guest contribution from Dug Cubie, a PhD student in UCC.

Mary Robinson, President of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice (MRFCJ), delivered a lecture at UCC’s Centre for Global Development titled ‘Climate Justice Post Durban’ on 18 January 2012. Dr. Robinson explored the outcomes of the most recent UN climate change conference, COP17, which took place in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011, from a climate justice perspective and the extent to which it addressed the needs of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.  COP17, she said, was concerned with “what I believe to be the most critical issue we all face – the future of our planet. In these times of economic crisis, amid worries about our own and the European and international economies, it is not surprising that attention focuses on our immediate problems. But, make no mistake about it, we ignore the threat posed by climate change at our peril.” Read Full Post »

The exploitation of Ireland’s natural resources has given rise to some of our livelier posts of the past year. 2012 may see an ‘anti-fracking’ campaign in Clare join the Shell to Sea campaign on the battlefield over the state’s efforts to exploit natural resources in the West of Ireland. ‘Fracking’ is shorthand for a process known as ‘hydraulic fracturing’ that, in short, involves pumping high pressure fluids into the ground to fracture the underlying rock and make it easier to extract fossil fuels such as gas. Opposition groups include ‘What the Frack‘ in Ireland and ‘Frack Off‘ in the UK. Last Tuesday’s Irish Examiner carried a letter of opposition from the Centre for Environmental Living & Training, based in Scariff, County Clare and a report in today’s Irish Times suggests that the campaign against fracking in the Clare Basin will be stepped up in the new year. Read Full Post »

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.

 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 »

Two leading US civil rights groups, Disability Rights Advocates and the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled have filed a lawsuit claiming that the City of New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg placed disabled people in life-threatening situations by failing to take their “unique needs” into consideration when planning for emergencies and disasters. The organisations taking the action claim that major disasters in New York City such as September 11^th and Hurricane Irene have highlighted how the city is not prepared to meet the needs of its 900,000 citizens with disabilities during times of emergencies.

During the recent response to Hurricane Irene, there were reports that 75% of the designated emergency shelters in New York were not fully accessible to wheelchair users, the televised emergency announcements did not include American Sign Language and the evacuation maps from the city were not useable by persons with no or low vision. Additionally the modes of transport used for evacuation included school buses, which did not have lifts for wheelchair users.

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 thrilled to host this piece by Dr. Liam Leonard from the School of Sociology, Criminology and Human Rights, IT Sligo as part of the “Thoughts on a New Ireland” blognival.

The fiscal crisis that has gripped Ireland has an interesting subtext in the many environmental justice issues which emerged during the years of during and preceding economic growth. During the last forty years, some controversial infrastructural projects came to be perceived as threats to local levels of health, in addition to creating risks for the environment, or to the heritage of the nation itself. The first of these collective responses emerged in the wake of the attempt to build onshore pipelines on the west coast of County Mayo. Locals objected to this proposal, and resisted attempts by the multinational involved to gain access to their land. As a result, five local men were imprisoned for 94 days for refusing to agree to an injunction that would allow the agents of the multinational access to their property. What followed was a campaign that gripped the nation’s imagination, as ‘Shell to Sea’ protests sprung up across the island and beyond in response to the community’s demand that the gas be processed offshore. The men were released in the summer of 2006, and their campaign for justice continues. Read Full Post »

 The Call for Papers has been issued for the forthcoming international conference “Contemporary Housing Issues in a Changing Europe” to be held 20-21 April 2012 at NUI Galway. The conference is being organised by  the Centre for Housing Law, Rights and Policy at NUI Galway in association with the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) Legal Aspects of Land and Planning WG, Public Interest Law Alliance (PILA), the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA), Housing Rights Watch, Fondation Abbé Pierre and the Centre for Disability Law and Policy (CDLP). The Call is posted after the jump. Read Full Post »