Human Rights in Ireland

 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 »

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 »

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 head of the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association and leading member of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement Marian Price is currently being held in the hospital wing of Maghaberry High Security Prison, an otherwise male facility. Price, who was convicted of the Old Bailey bombings in 1973, has had her life licence revoked by Owen Patterson, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

As a committed anti-GFA Republican, Price is no stranger to the criminal justice system. In the past number of years she has been charged with attending an illegal march, providing property (a mobile phone) for the purposes of terrorism and encouraging support for an illegal organisation. As of yet, Price has not been convicted of the latter two offences. The statement by Owen Paterson reads: 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!

An atheist group in New York has filed a suit in response to the erection of a crucifix at the ground zero site. Relying both on state and federal law, one of the chief complaints lies in the ‘establishment clause’ of the federal constitution, the main basis for the legal separation of church and state.  The first amendment provides: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the freee exercise thereof”. Although initially applicable to the federal government only, it was “incorporated” via the fourteenth amendment and thereby applied to states’ actions and laws. The suit in the New York Supreme Court contends that Members of American Atheists  “are being subjected to and injured in consequence of having a religious tradition not their own imposed upon them” .

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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 pleased to publish this post by Katherine O’Donnell, Director of Women’s Studies, (UCD School of Social Justice) and member of the Advisory Committee of Justice for Magdalenes.

Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) www.magdalenelaundries.com has been focused on providing evidence of the Irish State’s collusion in the punitive, recarceal, for-profit-enterprises known as the Magdalene Laundries which were operated at ten locations by four Catholic religious orders – the last one closed in 1996. JFM has been circulating a draft ‘restorative justice and redress scheme’ for the women and girls who were incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundry system.

We propose that, following an apology by the State, a dedicated unit within the Department of Justice is established with the remit of facilitating surviving women and their families to access all state social services to which they are entitled and to operating as an ‘inter-departmental’ hub in further facilitating other State services and expertise. We are currently working on the detail of a compensation scheme, for lost wages, pension contributions and personal damage, the funding of which is envisaged will be provided by the Religious Congregations. In coming to terms with the complexities we have become avid students of  the wide variety of truth commissions and redress schemes which everywhere have to navigate the  gap between best Human Rights practice such as that enshrined in the 2005 UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law etc. and  individuals’ rights to privacy, family life and a good name.

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