Speech on the Thirty-First Amendment of the Constitution (Children) Bill

In welcoming the Thirty-First Amendment of the Constitution (Children) Bill 2012 I compliment the Minister for Child and Youth Affairs, her staff and her officials on their tenacity, commitment and resolve in adopting a bipartisan, cross-party approach to bring the legislation before the House. The Minister is to be commended for reaching out, listening and engaging. She was correct when she stated:

We must hope that some day the rights accruing to Irish citizens will be implicit. Until then we must make them explicit.

I hope the legislation will represent not just a new beginning but also the creation of a new Ireland which allows us to learn from what we have done wrong and protects and embraces the welfare of all our children.

This debate is critical. It is taking place at a time when our economic sovereignty is being questioned and our economic recovery is in its infancy. We are saying to families, children and the people that we value each other and that we want to live in a society that cherishes children. On an evening when we have debated the issue of the Magdalene laundries we are saying we have learned from the past and that we want to embrace the future through the medium of this constitutional amendment.

I had the pleasure and the privilege of chairing the Joint Committee on Health and Children which dealt with the Children First legislation. I have been fascinated by people’s sense of expectation and excitement in looking forward to the referendum, but I have also been struck by the tremendous work, insight and ability of so many to reach out and make this a better society. The Bill is not just about children; it is also about building the family, supporting communities and stating children at risk must not just be a headline in a newspaper or a statistic in a report. It cannot be a catch-phrase. It states the State will act and work with parents to ensure the dark evil days will be no more.

The House debated the Magdalene laundries in Private Members’ time. Seanad Éireann debated Private Members’ motions on the issue of homophobic bullying and tonight in this Chamber we are dealing with a Bill to hold a children’s rights referendum. It is about putting people first. After the bringing forward of 17 reports, it is very much welcome that we will have a referendum which I hope the people will resoundly pass. Those who question the need for a referendum should do so, but they should also cast their minds back to the reports we have seen. Seventeen reports were written, independent of Governments of all hues; they outlined a catalogue of errors and a failure to act on behalf of children. We have a Government which has reached across the floor and stated we can no longer continue in the way we have been. The journey must not conclude with the referendum. We must continue to work with and provide for families which require the State to intervene and work for and with them. Mrs. Hillary Clinton famously wrote that it took a village to raise a child. I agree with her and, as the Minister stated at the press conference, that the best place for the child is at home with his or her family, but if the family cannot rear him or her, the State has a duty and right to intervene in exceptional circumstances. That is the reason the referendum is vital. It is about protecting children and supporting families.

As Deputy Maureen O’Sullivan stated, the amendment is also concerned with addressing the issue of adoption in order to ensure that children who wish to be adopted will be adopted and that families which want to adopt will be able to do so.

The task of arriving at a formula of words may have taken a long time to complete and many may have believed that we would never reach this point. However, we have done what we set out to do. As Chairman of the Joint Committee on Health and Children, I compliment its Opposition members, Deputies Ó Caoláin, McConalogue, Troy and Seamus Healy, and Senator van Turnhout and those on the Government side on the work they have done to ensure that we put children first.

Lest people forget, it must be stated that the forthcoming referendum will reassert the view that the best place for a child is within his or her family. However, I cannot overemphasise the fact that this is not always the case and that there will be instances when intervention will be necessary. The Government has seen to it that for the first time in the history of the State a senior Minister with responsibility for children and youth affairs has a seat at the Cabinet table. It is also in the process of establishing a child and family support agency and has put in place the Children First legislation and drawn up the National Vetting Bureau (Children and Vulnerable Persons) Bill 2012. These comprise a suite of legislative and administrative procedures and policies designed to ensure that the referendum will be another part of the jigsaw relating to Irish society.

I welcome the new Article 42A, which deals with children. This is an important point. It is incumbent on everyone in this House, irrespective of his or her political affiliations or views, to ensure that children are protected. The forthcoming referendum is necessary not just as a result of the failure on the part of the State but also that of the church to act and intervene on behalf of children. The proposed new article declares that “The State recognises and affirms the natural and imprescriptible rights of all children and shall, as far as practicable, by its laws protect and vindicate those rights.” That is what we are about, namely, ensuring that we allow our society to flourish and blossom. We must, as Deputy Catherine Murphy indicated, send a message to the outside world that this is a new and modern Ireland which has values and a sense of itself going forward.

If one considers our journey from the report compiled by former Supreme Court Justice Catherine McGuinness on the Kilkenny incest case to the point at which we find ourselves today, one can see that this referendum is necessary. The Bill does not merely relate to amending the Constitution, it is also relates to people. If we are to cherish all of our children equally, then the referendum must be passed. If we fail to pass the referendum, it will not necessarily be a regressive step. It will, however, be a statement to the effect that the work done in the past 18 months on a cross-party basis has been worthless. That work is not worthless, it is worthwhile.

In the context of adoption, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs has in recent days reached out to the authorities in Vietnam and re-established our connection with that country. This shows that there is new thinking and a new approach within the Government in respect of the issues involved.

The forthcoming referendum is important and I encourage everyone to take the opportunity to vote. In particular, I wish to take this opportunity to reach out to the young people in our third level institutions to take advantage of the fact that the referendum is being held on a Saturday. I urge them to go home to vote or to register in the new constituencies in which they are living in order that they may do so. Everybody has a duty to vote “Yes” in the referendum. What is being done here is not about today, rather it relates to the Ireland of tomorrow.

Deputy Tom Hayes: Information on Tom Hayes Zoom on Tom Hayes I am pleased to contribute to the debate on this Bill, which is hugely important to many people throughout the country. Amending the Constitution is a serious matter which always requires serious debate. This has never been more true than in the case of the proposed thirty-first amendment to the Constitution. The aim of the amendment is clear, namely, to enshrine children’s rights in the Constitution – a document which dictates how our Government operates and that for which our country stands – for the first time. This amendment was not drawn up overnight, it is the result of five years of formal deliberation and almost 12 years of public and private debate.

I compliment the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, on arriving at a wording that is acceptable to everybody in the House. Earlier this evening I listened with interest to the contributions of Opposition Members who also praised the Minister. It is a welcome, if not unique, development that we are discussing children in this House and that there is agreement on the matter. I again compliment the Minister in that regard. I also compliment those opposite on being fair and open. What is happening here bodes well for the Houses of the Oireachtas for the future and we must seek to learn from it.

Ireland has been obliged to learn the importance of children’s rights the hard way. Members do not need to be reminded of that fact. Since 1993 there have seen 17 reports in which the failures of our child protection system have been outlined in detail. Arguably, one of the most shocking reports relates to the Roscommon child care case. This report laid much of the blame at the feet of the State. It also detailed how it took the relevant health board eight years to react appropriately to horrific levels of child abuse. We watched in amazement as the details relating to that case emerged.

While most of us in this Chamber are in broad agreement on the need for the rights of children to be enshrined in our Constitution, some outside do not see matters in that way. Some opponents say that the forthcoming referendum is not necessary and that legislation alone would be sufficient. I disagree. While it was never the intention of those who framed it, the Constitution, as it currently stands, is vague on this issue. The Constitution can often be manipulated and interpreted as a document which places greater value on the rights of parents than on those of children. In some cases, this has allowed abuse to continue even when that should not have been the case. There are too many examples of instances when the State could have intervened but did not do so simply because it felt vulnerable from a legal standpoint. I contend that this will no longer be the case.

The thirty-first amendment to the Constitution will put the rights of the child front and centre in our legal system. It will give children, having regard for their young age and potential vulnerability, special protection by virtue of formally recognising their importance within our Constitution. The amendment will also remove obstacles for married parents to the voluntary placement of children for adoption. In the absence of this change some children would remain in short-term care for the entire duration of their childhoods, without the possibility of being party to the security that adoption brings. The amendment will also end the current practice of treating children differently on foot of their parents’ marital status. It will ensure that the rights of the family, as set out in Article 41 of the Constitution, will be respected and preserved in exactly the way they were meant to be. It must be remembered that our Constitution expresses our priorities as a country, shapes all of our discussions in this House and provides certainty as to that for which we stand.

I wish to conclude by recognising the work already done by the many families throughout the country that have devoted their lives to children in need. I refer to those who have taken in children and helped them through difficult periods in their own lives.