The new Human Rights Commission would be an impoverished quango, starved at birth by an annual budget of £600,000, the director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Mr Donncha O'Connell, said at the annual Amnesty International conference this weekend.
The commission, to be established by July, will have eight members and a president, all of whom will be appointed by the Government.
Mr O'Connell said the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission had operated on a budget of £750,000 sterling, which was less than it required. The proposed £600,000 budget was "woefully inadequate" although the Government had indicated unofficially that the budget would be increased to £1.5 million. The legislation was good, he added, and was to be welcomed. The director of Amnesty International Ireland, Ms Mary Lawlor, said there was a real danger the appointments would not be open and transparent and the message had to be that the members would be the right people.
Proper appointments would show the Government was serious about human rights and they would be a legacy for future generations.
Human rights issues in Irish society included the tackling of racism, the treatment of asylum-seekers, complaints against the gardai, and the repeal of emergency legislation. "We would look very much to other issues such as people with disabilities, homelessness, poverty," she said.
Mr Bill Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI, Galway, said the commission's success would depend on how vigorous its members were and the Government would have to be encouraged to make proper appointments.
"Let us not let this go by without a public hue and cry," he said. Mr Rodney Rice, the RTE journalist, who chaired the panel discussion, said the £600,000 budget was not an auspicious start. It would employ four "Hugh O'Flahertys" so long as they did not want any expenses.
Some 14 organisations, including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, have jointly called for an open and transparent appointments procedure to the commission.
Delegates at the conference also heard of plans to introduce educational and training courses on human rights at the Garda College in Templemore.
Supt Pat Murphy of the promotion school said partnerships would be developed with bodies such as Amnesty International.
He said a human rights ethos would pervade every aspect of Garda training from management down. While policing was traditionally about law enforcement, the protection of human dignity and human rights was becoming more important because of the increasing internationalisation of Irish society.
"Our aim is to develop a human rights philosophy and a human rights culture and place that at the centre of policing."
Mr O'Connell said he welcomed the Garda's human rights initiative. "If, in future, the Irish police are called to task by an international body, then they will no longer have excuses."
But he said it was "literally weeks" since the Abbeylara incident, when a Co Longford man was shot dead by the gardai, and they were persisting in keeping their investigation secret. They could not persist with that kind of culture and present human rights as something which was part of Garda culture.