The next government must agree to a referendum to strengthen children's rights if vulnerable children are to have the best possible chance of enjoying a secure family life, a conference heard yesterday.
Solicitor and child law expert Geoffrey Shannon said that at present children were relatively invisible in the Constitution. This meant their best interests were often ignored.
Specifically, a move to strengthen children's rights would ensure that children of marital and non-marital families were treated more equally in the eyes of the law.
At present these imbalances mean it is much more difficult for the State to intervene in cases of suspected abuse of a child in a marital family, while it is almost impossible to arrange for the adoption of children in care who were born into marital families.
Mr Shannon was speaking at the agm of Treoir, the national federation of services working with unmarried parents and their children. He said the Baby Ann judgment had highlighted the need for constitutional change.
In this case the Supreme Court ruled that a two-year-old girl who had lived with her prospective adoptive parents since she was three months old should be returned to her natural parents.
A crucial factor in the Supreme Court's decision was that the baby girl's birth parents had married, just one month before the High Court case.
Mr Shannon said the threshold for State intervention in cases where there was evidence that children were at risk in marital families was extremely high.
He said it was a "nonsense" to suggest that a slight lowering of this threshold would lead to the spectre of social workers interfering needlessly in families.