The head of advocacy for one of Ireland’s leading children’s charities, Barnardos, has said the Irish Constitution 
discriminates against the children of married parents because it is very difficult to adopt such children.
Norah Gibbons, head of advocacy with Barnardos, made the remarks this week at the Parnell Summer School in Wicklow. However, official figures show that very few children are adopted in Ireland, whatever their family background.
According to the 2008 report from the Adoption Authority of Ireland, 200 domestic adoption orders were made in that year. Of these 200 minors, 133 were adopted by family members, for example, the husband of the mother or a grandparent.
Only 67 adoption orders to non-family members were made. Foster parents fall into this category and a mere 16 minors were adopted by foster parents in 2008.
Figures show that there are now 6,000 children in care, with the overwhelmingly majority of these in foster care.
Most of these children were removed from their families.
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.
Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald has said the Government would not adopt the referendum wording proposed by the previous government but would work with a wording which reflected the wording produced by the Oireachtas committee chaired by Mary O’Rourke.
“We will take the committee’s wording and examine what the concerns were about that, see if the current Attorney General shares the concerns of the previous attorney general,” she said.
Ms Fitzgerald said 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 yesterday, 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.”
Ms Fitzgerald said that Irish children faced a range of additional problems.
She pointed out that a substantial minority of school-going adolescents in Ireland were regular weekly drinkers, that there had been a significant increase in the number of Irish children who smoke, and that almost one-quarter of 7 year old Irish children are either overweight or obese.
One in ten Irish children and adolescents suffer a mental heath disorder.
She said: “So we must still ask if broader society is doing enough, even nearly enough to fulfil it’s obligations to respond to the greater cultural influences, the deeper societal problems not just to protect Irish children but, to protect the Irish childhood, to secure their future.”
Children looked to society for safety and security, education and opportunity, the Minister said.
“And for generations the state has not taken that responsibility seriously enough.”
She said that progress was being make towards the creation of a Child and Family Support Agency, separated out from the HSE which would be dedicated to child care and protection.
She said that progress by her department would be measurable by an increase in child safety.
She said the state would do more to support families on the edge “so they can stay together as a family unit while not exposing the kids to risk”.
But she added: “You will see that where risk does emerge, the State will have the power to act.”
The Minister said that, for too long, Irish culture demanded “silence and obedience from children” and that children “be seen and not heard”.
This needed to be replaced, she said, by “a society where we are open as educators, parents, health workers, social workers, public servants and citizens to listen to what our children and young people are telling us, verbally and non-verbally, as individuals and as groups.”
We must be willing, she said to be “and more open to engaging with children, to embrace their rights to speak and be heard, not as a nuisance, nor as inferiors, but rather as fellow-citizens, as the decision-makers of tomorrow”.