On our first holiday abroad as a family, after a few days of basking in Latin warmth, I piped up with the comment, “They like us here, Mum!” I must have been about six or seven years old. “What do you mean?” she replied, kindly.

“They like us. Children.”
That was Spain. More recently, I spent a year in Italy, and one of the most striking things about Italian society is the way children are treated. They are welcome everywhere, every time a child is brought to a restaurant or into a shop they are made a fuss over. At the centre of Siena, the Campo, the city square, children run around in their hordes playing together, while their parents and other adults watch over them from the cafés around. Italians keep a watchful eye over each other’s children, a sort of meerkat alertness, and they do it so instinctively that, at the early stages, when I was not clued in to it, I was berated a few times for not paying attention when a child had toddled past me. Simply being an adult with eyes is requirement enough. Children are at the centre of Italian life.
We have learned many things recently about how we Irish treat our children, and especially children of the poor. The disgraceful thing is that it has taken so long to realise it, to confront our shadow. It takes a lot of practice and effort to turn a blind eye to the presence of concentration camps in a society, a curious but all-too-human capacity to defer slavishly to authority.
Everything has to turn on its head now, I believe. There has to be a constitutional amendment on children’s rights. There has to be a powerful legal framework in this land to protect children, especially the poorest. With legal clout, cases could be brought against schools, parents, local authorities and government itself, on behalf of children, to ensure their potential for growth and opportunity is maximized. The reason that the government has dropped their plans to put an amendment to the people is, of course, because the implications are enormous. Society would have to change radically.
Isn’t it about time that it did?
One of the curious paradoxes about advocating for children’s rights is that it inevitably requires more State intervention, and an invasive approach to that shibboleth of Irish life, The Family. One can reasonably argue that the last thing that children need in this society is more State intervention, given that the state supervised these concentration camps for so long. But it is precisely because of this unquestioning devotion to the mystical notion of The Family that these children were enslaved.
But, like economics, it is regulation that matters. The law, the constitution, can set the standards, and raise the bar to at least attempt to ensure that all children are cherished equally, regardless of circumstance. The State has to recognise that it is, whether it likes it or not, the guardian of its children, and has to take its responsibilities seriously.
Our constitution does have at least one principle that is not enforced, to the detriment of children. Article 41 states:
2° The State shall endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
Assuming that in the 21st Century we accept that the sexism of this clause is outdated, the principle nevertheless is profound: a stay-at-home parent should not have to work. Single parents should not have to work, and out of every couple who have children, one of them should not have to work. This of course means that the State should pay the wages of every stay-at-home parent, subject to a means test.
But, like everything the State gives, there should be something demanded in return. A commitment to complete a thorough course of parenting skills and childhood development. A course in nutrition, on anger management, on budgeting, on survival skills.
The fact that children can leave school these days without having these life skills beggars belief, because I firmly believe if it were taught properly, the next generation of children would have far less problems. The cost of education is high, but the cost of ignorance is higher.
With proper education, the necessity to have a heavy-handed army of social workers trained to swoop in and meddle in dysfunctional families would diminish, and a lot less damage would be done in the long run. People, in general, want to do what’s right. They just need to understand it.
If there were a children’s rights clause in the constitution, then one piece of legislation planned by this government would not pass muster. The proposed civil partnership bill, which has yet to be published, is an attempt at introducing equality in some areas of life to gay couples, in terms of taxation, next-of-kin, and inheritance rights. But it is dismal in terms of the rights of children who have gay parents; they are ignored. Should the couple break up, a parent has no right of access to his or her child, and vice versa, no matter how strong the bond. This is cruel and abhorrent, and is typical of how this State punishes children for the circumstances into which they were born.
This sort of thinking has to stop. The only way forward is to protect all children, whatever their circumstances, and a child born to a lesbian or gay couple has to have the same rights as any other child. To this end, civil gay marriage is the only fair solution. It is time the old superstitions and myths are once and for all demolished.
Irish society is changing, far ahead of its lawmakers. There’s a lovely article and photo in the inishowennews.com. A father and daughter, who are both campaigning in the local elections, are proud as punch of each other. He is Batty Connell, a former garda, and now community worker, standing as an independent; she is Lisa Connell, one of the founders of LGBT Noise, and she’s one of the new generation of bright, eloquent and passionate activists fighting for equality, and specifically for gay civil marriage. If you’re in Dublin 8, give her a vote, or at least a transfer. She’s mighty.