Tír na nÓg

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Tuesday February 20, 2007 16:03 by Sean Crudden - impero sean at impero dot iol dot ie Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 087 9739945

The Rights of Children

"A useful starting point, therefore, might be to ask not why there is so much disruptive behaviour in Irish second-level schools but why there is so little?"

Professor Tom Collins

The Irish Times, 20 February 2007.

Sean Crudden

As I have often pointed out before it is not possible to pass a constitutional referendum to create perfect parents, teachers, nurses, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists. And the rights of children are trampled upon every day of the week not as a matter of law but as a matter of daily practice. It seems to me that there will be a very considerable lag between the passage of laws enshrining children’s rights and the vindication of those rights in practice in everyday life.

I have a friend who always wants to consult the rule-book in a club or "community" setting. That is because his instinct is to break and circumvent every rule in the book himself. In that sense we suspect that the law is always on the side of the oppressor who cunningly lines affairs up so that the law is on his side or, at worst for him, is powerless to intervene.

There again if a third party or outside agency tries to intervene in the relationship between a parent and child or between a pupil and teacher or between a psychiatrist and her client matters will probably become more inflamed and uncontrollable with worse consequences eventually for the weaker party in any one of these kernel binary relationships.

One notices, although we seldom yet hear anything about it, that special "Tribunals" have been set up to protect the rights of mental patients. Tribunals may, indeed, be a help to patients but, personally, I have no faith in courts of law as ministers to family welfare or to the welfare of children.

Perhaps in the end, like a lot of other things, it comes down to a matter of attitude. And it is impossible to overestimate the strength of authoritarianism and right-wing attitudes at every level in our civilisation today. There is never one-way traffic in these matters although there is always a "heavy" side and a "light" side. Unusually in my lifetime it seems to me that we have strong labourers today working on the side of enlightenment and genuine democracy. Ideally that work starts in the cradle.

To conclude, I am unashamedly robbing the conclusion to his article "Youth matters" by Tony Bates in today’s Irish Times when he refers to

"….. youth mental health innovations that we might want to consider piloting in Ireland to ensure that young people are heard, respected and supported as they journey into adulthood."