Irish governments and politicians pride themselves on Ireland's human rights record. Never a colonial power, we did not oppress any Third World countries. We were among the first to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights and its Optional Protocol, allowing Irish citizens to take cases to Strasbourg. Indeed, the first case heard by the European Court of Human Rights, the Lawless case, came from Ireland.
Ireland contributed to UN peace-keeping forces almost from the beginning. Former Foreign Minister Sean MacBride was co-founder of Amnesty International, the world's most effective non-governmental, human rights organisation. Irish aid agencies have worked tirelessly for democracy and human rights in the Third World. And now the world's top human rights official is our former President, Mary Robinson.
It all sounds pretty impressive but when you look a little closer to home the picture is less flattering. For all our eagerness to ratify the European Convention, we have never incorporated it into domestic law. The result has been that someone whose rights have been infringed cannot rely on the Convention in the Irish courts. That makes it pretty ineffective for most people. This is now the only one of the 40 member states of the Council of Europe that has not incorporated the Convention.
Our zeal for ratifying new human rights covenants also seems to have waned and we have quite shamefully failed to ratify two of the most fundamental UN human rights treaties, the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Ireland is almost alone among democratic states in failing to ratify them.
The official explanation is that we need to pass domestic legislation first and in particular that we must outlaw discrimination in the supply of goods and services before we can ratify CERD. The Equal Status Act, 1996, would have done that but it was struck down by the Supreme Court for technical reasons. Since then, however, there has been no rush to re-enact it and in the meantime we have no law prohibiting racial or ethnic discrimination, except in relation to employment.
And our treatment of minorities, one of the touchstones of any country's attitude to human rights, leaves a lot to be desired.
Irish society has for years displayed a deep and visceral prejudice towards Travellers, who live a Third World existence in the midst of our new-found prosperity. The number of Travellers is so small that if the political will had been there, a programme to radically improve their conditions and to respect their culture could have been implemented years ago. The will was not there.
Sadly, it is much the same with asylum-seekers and refugees. A fairly small influx of asylum-seekers - about one fifth of the number of Irish people who still emigrate each year - has caused panic in officialdom and revealed a nasty undercurrent of racism.
Border controls have been introduced, black people (some of them Irish citizens) have been singled out for questioning at ports of entry and a Refugee Act agreed by all parties in the Dail in 1996 has been largely junked. Newspapers have run lurid scare stories that have fuelled racial prejudice and politicians have done little to counter it by claiming that 90 per cent of asylum-seekers are bogus and by talking about the drain on the social welfare system allegedly caused by people whom they will not allow to work.
It seems that we are happy to help the poor and oppressed of the Third World or Eastern Europe - so long as they stay there and do not come to Ireland.
Our record is not much better on that other touchstone of basic human rights, the justice and prison systems. In 1993, before the paramilitary cease-fires, the UN Human Rights Committee said there was no justification for the continued use of the non-jury Special Criminal Court and criticised emergency legislation here.
Five years later the Special Court is still in use, only now an increasing share of its workload is made up of cases with no paramilitary connections and a two-tier justice system has developed where the prosecution can effectively decide whether an accused person gets a jury trial or not.
There are question marks about policing as well. Twenty years ago Amnesty issued a scathing report about allegations of ill-treatment of suspects by gardai, the so-called Heavy Gang, and about the Sallins mail train case, where the accused men had confessed to something they did not do. It took a long campaign to clear the Sallins accused and nothing was done about the gardai concerned.
Since then there have been plenty of other cases where people have confessed to crimes they did not commit. Governments have been extraordinarily reluctant to introduce the obvious safeguards of general audio/video-recording of Garda interviews and an effective and fully independent police complaints mechanism.
The prison system is even worse and was strongly condemned by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture in 1993. The Committee has just completed another visit to Ireland and is unlikely to have been much more impressed this time. The prisons are still overcrowded, often insanitary, drug-ridden and with totally inadequate facilities to enable prisoners to break out of the cycle of drug-addiction and frustration they are trapped in. There is some hope of improvement, however. The Good Friday Agreement commits the Government to setting up a Human Rights Commission, re-introducing the Equal Status Bill, looking again at incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights and reviewing the need for the Offences Against the State Acts.
Work is proceeding on the Human Rights Commission and it should be in place early next year. It is just a pity that Travellers, refugees and non-political victims of the justice system will have to thank the Northern conflict for increased protection of their rights, rather than a genuine desire to live up to the commitments contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Michael Farrell is Co-Chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties