Madam,- As a coalition of 80 organisations concerned with the rights and needs of children in Ireland, we would like to support Geoffrey Shannon's call for a referendum to articulate children's rights in the Constitution (Opinion, January 19th). We will be repeating this call at a hearing of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in June.
As Mr Shannon notes, a constitutional amendment is the only mechanism strong enough to ensure that those children most in need of help receive adequate protection. A constitutional amendment would also improve the lives of all of our children by ensuring that all children receive, for example, a good education, proper healthcare, and the opportunity to live in a healthy environment.
At the moment, there are ways to ensure that all children are treated well, through providing good services for children and their families and managing these services well. However, the reality is that these good practices are not always followed, and there is nothing to guarantee that children will not be forgotten in an endless round of bureaucracy. Explicitly stating within the Constitution that children deserve to be treated properly because they are human and have certain human rights would show our society was serious about making sure all of our children grow up to be the best they can be.
Constitutional change to fully articulate children's rights would give proper legal standing to what we already know through common sense: that children are people too. The current constitutional provision tells half the story - children are indeed sons and daughters, grandsons and nieces, but they are also students, friends, athletes, artists, etc in their own right.
Childhood is a fleeting, vitally important time, and for some children it is very difficult indeed. The implications for not articulating children's rights are real: for example, children will remain in abusive situations, children will not see both of their parents regularly, children will remain in foster care for years with no hope of being adopted into their new families. In 1993, 1996 and 1998 the possibility of articulating children's rights in the Constitution through a referendum was recommended. The time for talking is over; the time for action is now. - Yours, etc,
JILLIAN VAN TURNHOUT, Chief Executive, Children's Rights Alliance, Upper Mount Street, Dublin 2.