The Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP) has published a document calling for four new rights to be put into the Constitution to guarantee the individual's social and economic wellbeing.
It was presented by Dr Laurence Ryan, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and president of the ICJP, who said yesterday that, although the Irish Bishops' Conference had not yet read it in detail, he had "no doubt it would be supported by the bishops".
The four rights are a right to adequate housing; health; adequate nourishment; and an adequate standard of living.
Dr Ryan commented on the appropriateness of such a document in a year which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and which has seen the Belfast Agreement.
While the country enjoyed a great economic boom there remained a serious poverty problem, he said, drawing attention to the recent UN Human Development report which showed Ireland had the second-worst poverty levels in the industrialised world.
More generally, he believed there had been less emphasis on social and economic rights in the West due to the Cold War, which had seen a greater emphasis on civil and political rights as a response to totalitarianism. But he thought Ireland was now at a stage in its history when social and economic rights should be part of the fundamental laws.
"Our Constitution does give protection to the rights of the haves," he said, instancing the right to property, "but the rights of the have-nots need equal protection."
Pointing out that average annual growth between 1986 and 1996 was 5.5 per cent, and likely to be 7.5 per cent this year, he said: "The market creates wealth but politicians must aim at a fair distribution of that wealth. The market on its own will not provide. It needs to be tempered . . . otherwise we will end up in a moral wasteland." The market was "a good servant but a bad master".
Mr Jerome Connolly, executive secretary of the ICJP, a body set up by the Irish Catholic bishops, said there was already "a large underpinning" for the proposed socio-economic rights in statute law, which amounted to a formal expression of fundamental human values. Anticipating that one of the criticisms would be that of cost, he said that socio-economic rights had always been part of the Constitution and had had no adverse economic consequences. One instance was the right to a primary education.
Mr Gerry Whyte, a law lecturer, said the practical implications of the document went to the core of the type of society we would have for the future. He compared its thinking to the "third way" of the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, between the emphasis on the individual's rights in the liberal tradition and on the common good in the Marxist/Judeo-Christian traditions.
Reform of the Constitution would strengthen the courts' role in cases of egregious dereliction of duty by the State, he said, and he instanced the July 29th order of Mr Justice Kelly in the High Court who, on what he described as the "scandal" of the State's prolonged treatment of troubled children, ordered the Minister for Health to provide a 24-hour high-support unit for such children within three years. He would prefer if such matters were addressed by politicians rather than the judiciary, "but often they are ignored."
Prof Patrick Hannon, of St Patrick's College Maynooth, said that whereas the document was based on Catholic social teaching and the Judeo-Christian tradition regarding the poor, its language was rights language and its argumentation was rights argumentation. "So I would hope people not of our tradition can participate in the debate," he said.
