proposed children’s rights referendum is being examined by the Attorney General,
the Minister
for Children, Frances Fitzgerald (pictured) has said.
Speaking yesterday to
reporters at the Fine Gael think in Galway she said she expected to see
substantial progress in the next few weeks, the Irish Times
reported.
“We will then be
looking at the wording and the Cabinet will decide on a date. At the moment we
don’t have a date, but it remains a high priority for the Government once we
have a wording agreed.”
The Minister said
there had been some difficulties with the wordings which had been in the public
arena and the Government wanted to get it right.
“There have been some
difficulties with those. But we are committed to wording along the lines
originally proposed by the all-party constitutional committee on children,” she
said.
That
wording has been criticised because the ‘best interests’ of the child concept
which it includes is open to potentially very wide interpretation and may give
the State excessive powers of intervention in families.
Earlier, the Minister
and her cabinet colleague Minister for Justice Alan Shatter and Norah Gibbons,
head of advocacy at Barnardos spoke to Fine Gael TDs and Senators at a session
geared towards child protection and the planned referendum on children’s
rights.
The wording proposed
by a Joint Oireachtas committee last year for a referendum on “children’s
rights” would make it easier to adopt the children of married parents, although
there are no proposals to make adoption per se more
common.
Article 42.5 of the
proposed wording said: “Provision may be made by law for the adoption of any
child where the parents have failed for such a period of time as may prescribed
by law in their responsibility towards the child and where the best interests of
the child so require.”
However, the wording
proposed by the outgoing Government, which took into account concerns expressed
by a number of Government departments, did not include a provision making it
easier to put the children of married couples up for
adoption.
Ms Fitzgerald said
last month it was the Government’s intention to come up with wording that
“reflects the wording of the committee” rather than that proposed by the
previous government. “As soon as that is agreed and brought to Government, then
we will publish it and we will begin an engagement around helping people
understand why it is necessary.”
Meanwhile, Minister
Fitzgerald has said that fixing the State’s failures with regard to child
protection is “not enough”.
Speaking at the
Merriman School conference in August, the Minister warned that Ireland couldn’t
return “to the outlook that treats children as little vessels to be filled to
the brim with imperial gallons of facts”.
She said: “Twenty
years from now, we will need people who are entrepreneurial, creative, gifted at
design, diplomatic, worldly, insightful, open-minded and
confident.
“Those attributes are
not poured like..facts into little vessels, rather they are imbued into the very
fabric of society.”
