Until we change the Constitution, we are failing to protect our children

DID the Archbishop of Dublin throw down the gauntlet to the Government last week?

Why would he of all people do that? And why would he choose the issue of children’s rights to do it?

He was speaking to the Mater Dei Institute, on the subject of relations between Church and State. Interestingly, he chose to emphasise at the beginning of his speech that he wasn’t suggesting in any sense that the new government was more anti-church than the previous one. He then went on to give something of a lecture to the new Minister for Education (whom he didn’t name) about the need for continued pluralism in our school system.

Now, I would have thought that if there was one politician in Ireland you don’t need to lecture about pluralism, it’s Ruairi Quinn. However, as the archbishop makes clear, when he is talking about pluralism he means the pluralism inherent in maintaining the Catholic ethos in our school system.

Fair enough, I reckon — what else would you expect a Catholic archbishop to say? But haven’t things come to a strange pass when a Catholic prelate needs to make an argument like this one in defence of Catholic schools: “But pluralism in educational provision is not an easy task to realise. Simply providing greater choice will not guarantee true pluralism. People may use pluralism in school choice to choose to opt out of pluralism. The temptation will always exist for parents to choose a school precisely because it is not pluralist, because there are no disadvantaged or marginalised children.”

Like Ruairi Quinn, I believe in pluralism, and in choice. I’ve always believed that parents should be able, within reasonable limits, to send their children to the school of their choice. But in Ireland still today there are thousands of schools, primary and secondary, who use “membership of the Catholic faith” as a core selection criterion for admission. I don’t see anyone trying to force that to change.

But the archbishop really got into high gear when he got on to the subject of the state and children. “It is not the State’s job to bring up children; it is the job of parents.”

That’s not actually Archbishop Martin speaking — instead he is quoting President Bill Clinton as saying so, and quoting the former President with great approval. He then goes on to make what I regard as a sort of moral equivalence between the role of the Church and the role of the state in the abuse of children in the past. “It is clear to all the serious mistakes wrongdoings of the Church in the area of the care of children and in some of its institutions,” he says. But he immediately goes on to say, “However, it is equally easy to indicate how the State failed both in its role of monitoring what was happening in those institutions but also about the quality of the institutions for which it bears direct responsibility. The record of the State in child care in Ireland is not one that we can be proud of.”

And he has other criticisms of the state and the way in which it discharges its responsibilities to vulnerable people. “There are other areas where the weakness of State management is evident,” he says. “Our prison service — for which the State has sole responsibility — has been the object of continual and stringent international criticism by highly respected human rights institutions. The inadequacies of our health system require no illustration by me. Exclusive and direct State provision of services is no guarantee of their quality.”

These are valid and legitimate criticisms. You would think that the person making them would be absolutely certain that his or her own house was in order, but be that as it may, the criticisms are objectively fair. It surely isn’t possible, though, to level criticisms like that at the state, and then go on to suggest that things should effectively remain the same. But that, it seems to me, is precisely what the archbishop went on to do.

“We need mechanisms to ensure that the rights of children are adequately protected,” he said. “But in general it would be wrong to think that simply moving responsibility from parents to the State would provide a more effective answer. The fundamental rights of parents are enshrined not just in our Irish Constriction but also in the major International Human Rights Instruments including the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

And then he goes on to argue that “the Irish Constitution has overall served the people of Ireland well. Our constitution is far from being some sort of unquestioning regurgitation of sectarian Catholic principles as some simplistic caricatures of it would seem to imply. It is a remarkably modern constitution in many of its aspects. Constitutions should be and must be changed to address challenges in society but not at every whim. Constitutions are not there in general to be played around with lightly and often.

The Irish Constitution clearly carves out a special role for the family. The legal presumption is that the definition of the family in the Constitution is one based on marriage between a man and a woman. … Marriage is however a fundamental good in society which deserves a unique protection.”

I WAS struck, reading the Archbishop’s speech, at the fact that he quoted Bill Clinton. Bill’s wife, Hillary, has always been vocal on the subject of children — in fact she wrote a best-selling book called “It Takes a Village”. And in a famous speech she made, when her husband was being nominated for a second time to run for the Presidency of the United States, she elaborated on the theme of that book.

“Of course,” she said, “parents, first and foremost, are responsible for their children. But we are all responsible for ensuring that children are raised in a nation that doesn’t just talk about family values, but acts in ways that values families … to raise a happy, healthy and hopeful child, it takes a family, it takes teachers, it takes clergy, it takes business people, it takes community leaders, it takes those who protect our health and safety, it takes all of us. “Yes, it takes a village. And it takes a president. It takes a president who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children — who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family, who believes not only in the promise of each of us as individuals, but in our promise together as a nation.”

There was a lot more to that Hillary Clinton speech than I’ve quoted here. The essential point is that was are all responsible. We are all responsible for the world our children are reared in — the world of our family, our neighbourhood, our country. And we are fundamentally responsible, all of us, for protecting our children. We, in the sense, is the state. Our state. Our state carries responsibility, in the ultimate, for the safety and protection of our children. If we’re not even willing to discuss changing our constitution, we’re failing in that responsibility.