We’re strong on spurious rights and weak on values that matter

ARE there questions to be answered about the questions they set?

Or does the real question lie somewhere else.

For example, why are we getting worked up about an oversight in some exam papers at a time when people are facing more serious affronts to their dignity in hospitals and nursing homes?

We can understand why some students in the Navan area were upset by an exam question asking people to write about "travelling in the school bus".

But by the end of last week's controversy, students all over the country were being encouraged to feel upset.

Egged on by media attention, an over-the-top reaction by some teachers and the opportunism of certain politicians, they were led to believe themselves wronged, to feel a sense of outrage they shouldn't have felt in the first place.

Unfortunately, too, we were treated to a full page from the Government's crisis management handbook.

We got the initial soothing noises, the call for 'sensitivity,' and the mandatory 'report' into the exam paper faux pas.

Not that the opposition did any better. Exam papers should be capable of being modified, said Fine Gael's Olwyn Enright, so that issues "related to a significant national tragedy such as the one in Meath" would not feature.

Should Fine Gael not go the whole hog, one wonders, and apologise for not having foreseen this glitch in our examination system?

And are we to infer from Olwyn's call that it really doesn't matter if our exams include questions about Beslan or the tsunami since our teenagers are unlikely to be upset about the fate of the far-off? And are we happy with that?

The episode reveals something more than silliness in our society.

We seem no longer capable of discerning between the harmful and the beneficial, or distinguishing between the serious and the trivial.

The Equality Authority and the National Women's Council of Ireland were dismayed last week by the High Court ruling that Portmarnock golf club can continue to exclude women as full members. And the ISPCC and Barnardos would, it seems, criminalise parents who make the slightest physical contact when disciplining their children. They backed a Council of Europe criticism of our law in this area.

There is an obvious paradox between our attempts at vigilance over issues as unimportant as examination papers and male-only golf clubs, and our failure to ensure a basic level of decency in the way we treat our sick and elderly people.

Perhaps it can be explained by the decline in respect for core values like duty, responsibility and service to others.

We have replaced these with a sterile list of obligations and norms designed to stop us from hurting each other.

Some of these are rooted in common sense. For example, we should certainly encourage parents to discipline their children in non-violent ways, if only because the extra effort this requires can itself set an example.

But what is patently ridiculous is the attempt to convert some of these new norms into rights whether it's the right to membership of a men-only golf club, or the right not to be tapped on the wrist by a loving parent.

Yet with each day that passes, the list gets longer thanks to the efforts of the European Union, overly-PC politicians and various home-based authorities and lobby groups.

However, the rights culture is doomed to failure. You can give people all sorts of rights at a cost to the State and to everybody else.

But the respect for other people which kept the creaky old system going, despite its faults, is irreplaceable.

Lose it, and you will not be able to cope with the downside of the new rights, if people become more demanding, litigious and concerned only for their own benefit.

For example, it has been the fashion in recent years to decry the role of the religious in health and education because of the authoritarian and sometimes abusive way in which many institutions were run in the past.

And yet, if you were looking for a nursing home today you would count yourself lucky to get into one run by a religious order.

THE reason is that they have a certain concept of human dignity that is reflected in the way residents are treated.

Visit a sick relative in some public hospitals or nursing homes, on the other hand, and you may find a different atmosphere.

Check whether the little things are being looked after. Was their hair washed, or was it not somebody's job?

Was their food chopped up, or did they fail to ask? Try introducing a new standard for the treatment of people in nursing homes and hospitals and you will immediately have calls for pay rises to reflect the new working conditions being imposed on staff.

You won't be able to guarantee such care anyway.

It either exists in the human heart or it doesn't exist at all. The 'rights' culture doesn't do heart. It just does lists. And, of course, it does indignation.

The director of the National Women's Council, Joanna McMinn, deplored the golf club's decision "because of the message it sends out that it is somehow acceptable to exclude women".

Although we have become used to hearing that sort of argument, it doesn't actually make sense.

A more thought-out view would hold that a person's freedom to associate is a higher value than any person's right to join any private club she wants, even if that person is a woman.

Don't get me wrong. I would almost certainly vote to include women members, if I could play golf and if I was a voting member of Portmarnock golf club. But the point is, I'm not, and I don't have any particular right to be either.

At least Ms McMinn is not on a public salary although the NWCI gets a hefty grant from the State.

But we are paying more directly for the particular opinions of Equality Authority chief executive Niall Crowley, on what constitutes equality.

Mr Crowley criticised the High Court judgement for maintaining "an unsatisfactory status quo" and is contemplating a Supreme Court challenge in an effort to replace the High Court's view with his own.

It may be time to introduce a new right the right not to have our tax money spent on ideological state quangos.