In her speech to the Progressive Democrats conference over the weekend, Mary Harney was anxious to kill off the notion that her party's radical edge has been blunted by too many years in power, writes Fintan O'Toole
The PDs, she assured us, are "a radical party, and will always be a radical party We are there to make a difference. We are there to make things happen. We are there to drive change for the benefit of the Irish people."
The party, as Michael McDowell put it, has to be radical or redundant. Yet that same Michael McDowell, now that he finally has Cabinet office, is emerging as a knee-jerk reactionary. The promise of a tough reformist zeal that he always seemed to carry with him is evaporating fast. In recent weeks, while our attention has been distracted by the war, a diehard instinct to protect the State from the people has emerged in the most extraordinary way.
Over the past few years, the Department of Foreign Affairs has been trying to make a name for itself on at least one issue: the rights of people with disabilities. There are about 600 million people with a disability around the world. Many are born disabled, but their numbers are increased all the time by wars, from the children maimed by US bombs in Baghdad to the women mutilated by machetes in the Congo. Only about 2 per cent of disabled children in the developing world receive any form of education or rehabilitation.
Our diplomats have seen this as an issue on which Ireland could take the lead. This hasn't been easy for them, since Ireland's record on the treatment of people with disabilities at home is so miserable that it is hard to raise the subject in an international forum without blushing. With the support of the then PD junior minister Liz O'Donnell, however, Ireland strongly supported an initiative by Mexico at the UN general assembly in 2001 to create a UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities.
The commitment to a convention has been real. One of the intellectual architects of the idea is Prof Gerard Quinn of NUI Galway. Just last January, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Tom Kitt, launched a major UN study on international disability rights, co-authored by Prof Quinn and largely funded by Ireland. Last year, Iveagh House hosted a large international conference on the issue.
All of this has meant that the convention on disability was to be Ireland's principal contribution to global human rights at the start of the 21st century. It may sit rather uneasily with the Jamie Sinnott case, the scandal of our mental hospitals and the harsh cutbacks in funding for disability services this year, but it does surely qualify as an example of making things happen and driving change. With the Special Olympics about to focus the attention of disability organisations on Ireland, it at least prevented the Government's hypocrisy from being absolute.
Things were moving ahead nicely. The UN established a committee to work on the convention last summer. It asked for proposals from memberstates and NGOs by March 10th last so that they could be considered at a meeting in New York next June. On February 28th, the EU Council's working group on human rights met in Brussels to prepare a joint EU position for the June meeting.
Going into this meeting, the other EU states saw Ireland as the flag-bearer. The enthusiasm of Foreign Affairs had generated a broad consensus at EU level and it was almost certain that every EU state at the meeting would support a common EU position in favour of the proposed convention. There was, however, one backward-looking state that stood out against the idea that people with disabilities should have basic rights enshrined in international law. To everyone's amazement that one state was Ireland.
The minutes of the meeting are not yet available, but the European Disability Forum, which is centrally involved in the process, reports that while the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs remained supportive, "strong opposition" came from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Or, in other words, from Michael McDowell.
The Cabinet will try to sort out this split, probably today. Given the imminent photo opportunity of the Special Olympics, the betting must be that Bertie will over-rule Michael McDowell, and commit Ireland to the convention again. But the damage has already been done. Ireland has lost its leading role, and Sweden has taken over as the main EU advocate of positive change for 600 million of the world's most vulnerable people.
For all the radical PD rhetoric, what we have here is plain, old-fashioned dogmatic conservatism. Genuine liberalism, even of a right-wing variety, puts the rights of the individual before those of the State. By opposing the UN Convention, on the other hand, Michael McDowell's position seeks to protect the State from awkward citizens looking for their rights. It's about as radical as bacon and cabbage.