Human Rights in Ireland

We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Verona Ní Dhrisceoil. Verona is currently completing a PhD in the area of law and language rights in University College Cork, under the supervision of Professor Siobhan Mullally. Her PhD has been funded by the Higher Education Authority.  Verona has worked as a legal researcher for the Law Reform Commission of Ireland and the Irish Penal Reform Trust, and in 2010, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

Recent government announcements proposing a Review of the Official Languages Act 2003 and a merging of the Office of the Language Commissioner with the Office of the Ombudsman have brought Irish language rights issues to the forefront of public and academic debate. The two separate but related proposals arise as part of the government’s National Plan for Recovery.

In March 2011, the government published an economic recovery plan titled Towards Recovery: Programme for National Government 2011-2016. In it, seven pledges were made to the Irish language under the An Ghaeilge agus An Ghaeltacht section. With specific reference to legislative protection, the Programme stated that a review of the Official Languages Act 2003 (OLA) will be carried out “to ensure expenditure on the language is best targeted towards the development of the language and that obligations are imposed appropriately in response to demand from citizens.” On this basis, the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, launched A Review of the Official Languages Act, in November 2011. As part of the review process, the Department has invited submissions evaluating the implementation of the Act, from interested parties. Submissions are to be made to the Department on or before the 31 January 2012. As part of the consultative process, the Department has also published a bilingual survey on its website to afford respondents the opportunity to indicate their views on the provision of public services in the Irish language.

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The thorny issue of secularism and religious diversity has entered the (nascent) French presidential race. Eva Joly, a popular Franco-Norwegian public figure who became famous for tackling corruption and environmental abuse as an investigating magistrate, entered the fray this week with a suggestion that the feast days of Yom Kippour and Aïd-el-kebir should be recognised by the State. The candidate for the Europe Écologie-Les Verts party, decried how Sarkozy’s presidency had set back the cause of equality, citing educational “apartheid” and the “undignified” treatment of those living in the disadvantaged banlieues. She  advocated measures which would ensure “equal treatment for religions in the public sphere”, including the addition of the Muslim and Jewish public holidays. She argued that in treating religions equally, this would advance rather than offend the distinct French tradition of state secularism or laïcité, in ensuring that public holidays were not attuned exclusively to the Christian calendar.

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Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of private education and the implicit commodification of learning. However, this emergent trans-continental rights-demand is not simply another traditional usage of rights. Very often, when we hear ‘human rights’ we think about them in the most legalistic of senses. They are fetishized as that which the state may guarantee for the subject. As noted by all sorts of critical theorists, such an identification leads to a thorough limitation of political agency. The political subject is figured simply as the individual in need of the state’s protection. I have recently argued, in Human Rights and Constituent Power, that we must begin to think about a different human rights,  a differential human rights. This idea of rights would have, as its condition of existence, a fundamentally split nature. On one side is the closure implicit in the juridical form, but on the other is the radical political demand to reshape the world. I have suggested that we might term this second limb ‘right-ing’ – in that it is a potent and creative process rather than something which is always already given. Let me develop the idea a little more in the context of the radical demand for a right to education instantiated in Chile and Colombia.

The ‘Chilean Winter’ has seen massive student demonstrations against one of the most privatized educational systems in the world. Joined by trade unions and other left organizations, the students have mobilized and manifested themselves in public space. They have fought for the re-establishment of public institutions which would be run on a not-for-profit basis. They have argued against the private universities and secondary schools that  render education as a commodity. 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.

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton today delivered a speech in Geneva to mark Human Rights day. This speech focused on LGBT human rights and is quoted in full below. It is certainly worth taking the time to read or watch, the video can be watched here.

Good evening, and let me express my deep honor and pleasure at being here. I want to thank Director General Tokayev and Ms. Wyden along with other ministers, ambassadors, excellencies, and UN partners. This weekend, we will celebrate Human Rights Day, the anniversary of one of the great accomplishments of the last century.

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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.

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!

The cuts agenda in the UK continues to cast a particularly deep shadow over Northern Ireland. The gleaming edifice of the Titanic Quarter (pictured left) in Belfast bears witness to the scale of public spending in Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, the 15-year and £7 billion development project remains, in an irresistible pun, the tip of a public-spending iceberg. As Henry McDonald flagged-up this week, public spending in Northern Ireland continues to outstrip levels in the remainder of the UK: Read Full Post »

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 »