The Referendum of the angry

The Referendum on Childrens’ Rights will be up for vote in exactly two weeks, millions of euros have been put aside for its promotional campaign but despite this, it is still getting an overall negative reaction.

One would think the Irish don’t want our children protected by the supreme law of the State but we would rather leave it up to the courts that have done a wonderful job so far sending them to industrial schools (and we all know how they were run) or placing them with seldom loving foster families; we do not care about our children.

This cannot be further from the truth. For this campaign to have caused so much anger and for persons in authority to look the other way is wrong. As previously mentioned the change to Article 42 is to set the fundamental rights of the children in stone. Although it does hand out some rights (e.g. the right to be heard in court), it does absolutely nothing to solidify the rights of the child within the family.

Is trom Seanad i bhfad

*1

Parliaments with two Houses are a historical consequence that did not bear much political thought. Initially the parliament was the establishment where the king or queen would meet the powerful (ie the creme of the social hierarchy -ecclesiastics, title bearers etc) and, through negotiation and adequate scheming, share the wealth and powers of the State. As time went by though, lower social layers penetrated the parliament – tenants such as merchants, tradesmen or established farmers, and this of course was to no one’s liking. It was not long before the parliamentary assembly was torn in two houses, one for the ‘Lords’ and another for the ‘Commoners’.

In other European countries, with the passage of time, monarchies were either retained to a symbolic role or abolished. Due to their allegedly non-democratic origins the upper houses followed suit and were swiftly replaced by unicameral legislatures.

IRISH FREE STATE

Surprisingly Ireland, in the current absence of royal rule, has a bicameral assembly; for Ireland this was not some sort of inheritance from the former occupier, instead it was a deliberate and conscious choice, introduced with its first official Constitution of Saorstat Eireann in 1922. Article 82 was constructed to ensure ‘representation for groups and parties not the adequately represented in Dail Eireann’. What this actually meant was that the nation was provided with a Seanad made primarily of non-Catholics and ex-unionists, attempting to balance off the formation of the Dail.

That Seanad is a great point of reference for two reasons: