Call to ratify UN code on disability

IRELAND WOULD “do well” in the United Nations’ forthcoming review of the State’s human rights record, the president of the Irish Human Rights Commission said yesterday.

Opening the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow, Dr Maurice Manning asked why it was taking so long for Ireland to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Person’s with Disabilities.

This was a “glaring exception” in the State’s record on international law which was “in some ways very good”, he said.

A problem and real weakness was that international human rights instruments were not directly incorporated into Irish law, he said.

The United Nations’ first periodic review of Ireland’s human rights records will take place in October.

“I believe we will do well. I think by and large the Government and various departments have learned a great deal in recent years,” he said. They have recognised the importance of international obligations, he added.

He urged the Government not just to be compliant with human rights laws but to show a leadership role in the review.

The current economic difficulties made it all the more important that human rights are observed as such protection cannot only be for the good times, Dr Manning added.

One thing to be learned from the economic crisis was that independent oversight of all areas of Irish society was vital.

There had been “resistance in some quarters” to a State-funded body overseeing State laws, policies and practices but international practice was moving solidly towards institutions such as the Irish Human Rights Commission.

Giving primacy to Oireachtas reform was one way politicians could do justice to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, he said.

The summer school’s theme is Equality Then and Now in memory of the centenary of the death of Charles Parnell’s sister Anna. The school heard that the first movement of feminism in Ireland, from the mid-19th century to the 1920s, had not featured in Irish history.

The evidence of the first Irish women’s movement was there to record but there had been silence in the history books, in folklore and society in general, Mary Cullen, researcher at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies in Trinity College Dublin, said.

After the 1920s, under Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fáil, the profile of the feminist movement lowered. To this day, there was no full history of Ireland’s first feminist movement, she said.