The wording of the Government’s children’s rights amendment is balanced and creates “a new focus on the centrality of the child’s interests,” the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin (pictured), has said.

Speaking at the annual Mass for the commencement of the new legal year, he said: “I believe that proposed wording for the upcoming Children’s Referendum is one which has attempted to address the rights and obligations of the various interested groups in a balanced way, while giving a new focus on the centrality of the child’s interests.”

He added that he hoped that the debate on the referendum “will reflect the same seriousness which has marked its realisation”.

He added: “Obviously a constitutional change will not be a magic formula which will resolve all the challenges for parents and children which sadly often emerge in our complex society and with which those of you involved in the administration of justice are acutely aware.

“A change of culture will take a long time to be imbedded within the various levels of society and public service.”

Archbishop Martin also said that Ireland needed to “find ways of educating and fostering responsibility, not just for our own endeavours, but for the type of just society we wish to create for all”.

This would involve “education to morality and to the ability to seek and discern what is truthful and good in the fullest sense,” he said.

Archbishop Martin said: “No one will doubt that one dimension of the current economic crisis is due to a crisis of public morality, where the quest for profit and prosperity became separated, both in individuals and perhaps even on a broader societal level, from serving of the common good.”

He said that, in an increasingly diverse and pluralist society, it was a challenge to come to a shared understanding of values. This was a perennial challenge in all societies, he said.

Archbishop Martin said: “Diversity may create new challenges but it may never be invoked to abstain or abdicate the need to address the question, to pose the challenging questions and to foster answers which challenge conformity and simplistic solutions.

“Morality and ethics are not a separate compartment from public life. Morality belongs to and shapes the common good.”