EAMON Gilmore just couldn't help himself. During the launch on
Wednesday of the Labour campaign in support of the children's rights'
referendum, he couldn't resist taking a pop at the churches.
Deploring
the attitudes of the past, he attacked "the way in which the State over
those decades (following Independence) kowtowed to churches in respect
of the care of children, to the detriment of children."
This was
an obvious reference to the industrial schools but he said it on the
same day that a report was published detailing the abuse of children as
recently as last year in St Patrick's Institution for Young Offenders.
Was the church responsible for that?
He said it even though the
Irish State hasn't kowtowed to the church in decades. And he said it as
the representative of a party that regularly kowtows to the unions.
Thus,
the Tanaiste managed to sound like a nationalist politician of old,
still fulminating about the effects of British rule in Ireland, decades
after it had come to an end.
This was simply Gilmore pandering to
his base, showing his true colours and linking the proposed change to
the Constitution to the continuing campaign to eradicate every trace of
Old Ireland that is not to their tastes.
I have still not fully
decided which way I will vote on November 10. I'm not convinced by the
arguments of the No side that the amendment will decisively shift the
balance of power in respect of who makes decisions about children away
from parents and towards the State.
However, if anything would
convince me to vote No it is the blatant linking of the referendum by
people like Eamon Gilmore to the ongoing Kulturkampf ('culture
struggle') that has been raging here for decades.
As mentioned,
the Tanaiste on Wednesday was referring indirectly to the treatment of
children in industrial schools.
In respect of those schools, however,
the real problem had much less to do with the Constitution and much more
to do with the nature of institutionalisation itself.
Sometimes
placing people in institutions is unavoidable, but we can see once again
from the report into St Patrick's that once you put people, especially
minors, into an institution and give another group power over them,
abuses are almost inevitable.
It certainly didn't help that we
trusted the Catholic Church so much in the past. We trusted that it
would look after the children in its institutions well -- and now we
know it often did the complete opposite, even leaving aside the
intrinsically awful nature of most institutions.
However,
children's institutions in whatever part of the world were, and are,
dreadful places as a rule. They were dreadful in Britain, Germany,
Sweden, Holland, everywhere. And they were dreadful no matter who ran
them.
The main reason we were able to get rid of the industrial
schools is because the money became available to look after troubled
children in better and more humane ways. More and better trained staff
were available for a start.
Yes campaigners complain that the
Constitution currently makes it too hard to remove children from their
families in certain circumstances.
But ironically they fail to notice
that this same Constitution did not stop children from being removed
from their homes and placed wholesale into institutions in the past.
So
clearly the Constitution doesn't make it so hard to take children away
from their families.
In fact, with respect to children and their rights,
a caricature of the Constitution is constantly being put before the
public.
For example, it is said that it does not mention the
rights of children, even though Article 42.5 explicitly mentions the
"natural and imprescriptible rights of the child".
Read it for yourself.
Read
it and you will also find that the Constitution gives children rights
adults do not have -- for example, the right to a free primary
education.
READ it and you will find that children, by virtue of
their citizenship, enjoy almost all of the rights adults enjoy, although
certain rights do not exist until a child reaches a certain age, such
as the right to vote.
Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman has
attacked the notion that the Constitution prefers parents over children.
He says it prefers parents over third parties, such as priests or
social workers.
Hopefully, that will remain the case if and when this
amendment is passed.
Professor Gerard Hogan, now a High Court
judge, referring to what the Constitution currently has to say about
children, told RTE in 2010 that he disagreed with "the suggestion that
the present provisions haven't worked well, or that they don't strike
the right balance, or are in some way responsible for lots of modern
ills -- because I think that is just, with respect, a grotesque
mis-statement and misunderstanding of the present constitutional
provision."
There may well be good arguments in favour of the
proposed amendment but Eamon Gilmore isn't making them. Instead what we
got from him was a "grotesque" caricature of exactly the sort described
by Justice Hogan.