Bishops' focus shifts from sex to foundations of our society

The Re-Righting the Constitution document published last week by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP) is a welcome indication of a shift in emphasis by the Catholic bishops away from a seeming preoccupation with sexual mores towards an anxiety about the fundamental nature of society.

That is not to say that the church as institution has not held such concerns up to now. But over the past three decades in the battle between emerging and traditional Ireland, one could be forgiven for leaning to a view that the bishops had just one obsession.

Indeed, in fairness, that seeming obsession might be said to reflect a preoccupation on the part of society as a whole.

It was not unlike the situation during the Cold War. Then, as Dr Laurence Ryan, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and president of the ICJP, observes in a foreword to the document, the west became preoccupied with civil and political rights to the detriment of others, as a reaction to totalitarianism.

It meant "a wedge was driven between two categories of rights," he said, with social, economic, and cultural rights being largely neglected. "But the Cold War is now over," he noted. The same might possibly be said of the war between the two Irelands.

And the ICJP document would indicate that new and previously unthinkable alignments might be possible as the Catholic Church in Ireland rediscovers its natural constituency among the poor, the ignored and the marginalised of Celtic Tiger country, while politicians on all sides seem to have been seduced by the market.

The bishops would also seem to be following where the Justice Office of CORI (the Conference of Religious of Ireland) has led for two decades. The ICJP is a commission set up by the Irish Episcopal Conference.

Of themselves the proposals that four new basic rights, dealing with nourishment, health, housing, and an adequate standard of living, be written into the Constitution are not quite revolutionary. As the ICJP executive secretary, Mr Jerome Connolly, pointed out at the publication of the document, there already exists a large underpinning in Irish statute law to make the proposed rights a reality. And the wording is loose enough to allow for such contingencies as the availability of resources.

But what they would do is place such rights beyond the winds of changing political policy and establish in a concrete way the foundations for a particular type of Irish society: one where all the children of the nation would be really cherished, and equally.

As things stand in the booming economy, "there is no in-built market mechanism to ensure that greater wealth and resources are equitably distributed," Bishop Ryan notes. "Without compensating and countervailing protections the opposite is more likely to happen."

In the document itself Mr Connolly writes: "The market place is at best indifferent to the requirements of human dignity. It must perforce equate value with price. It justifies its prominence in economic life by its ability to produce wealth, not by any innate capacity to respect and promote human dignity . . .

"Market forces can and do aggravate injustice and inequalities as well as provide the means to reduce them."

The document in the main is a response to the Report of the Review Group on the Constitution, published in May 1996.

Indeed, it could be said to be a highly-effective and thorough demolition of aspects of that report which, it says, did "not sustain a more detailed scrutiny in the light of contemporary human rights practice and understanding," and it illustrates this.

It found "serious inconsistencies in some of the positions and approaches" adopted by the review group. It asserts that the group "appears to underestimate or ignore the extent and significance of international obligations which the State has already incurred in regard to socio-economic rights [again illustrated]," and states that "the concept of socio-economic rights which appears to underlie the Group's approach is mistaken."

It concludes that the review group's report is "fundamentally flawed".

The case for inclusion of the four rights in the Constitution is "both morally compelling and legally and politically feasible", it says. They are rights which, if constitutionally enshrined, "could be directly invoked by and on behalf of the neediest and most vulnerable of our community, in a way in which the existing right to property, for example, cannot".

Addressing the "uncontrollable cost argument", the document says it is "quite practicable to state socio-economic rights in a form which will avoid the putative nightmare of leaving the Oireachtas with no option but to discharge the cost of `whatever it might be' [quoting the Review Group report" as determined by the judiciary", and proceeds to do that.

It also points out that one socio-economic right has been written into the Constitution from the start and without dire financial consequence for the State. The right to an education, it says, "is a prime example of a major socio-economic right which is not constitutionally defined as to content, [and which] carries with it substantial resource implications."

It drafts the four proposed rights in a way which avoids the two extremes of "individualism pushed to the point of social breakdown and institutionalised greed, and that of the omnicompetent state which purports to provide for all human needs to the exclusion or detriment of personal responsibility and initiative."

Those with long memories will recall that it was this Catholic Church concern with an encroaching "omnicompetent state" which prompted the Mother and Child crisis in 1951.

Re-Righting the Constitution, however, is a child of the 90s. It is pitched at mainstream Ireland rather than just the devout. It is intended to stimulate discussion, not stifle it.

It is deserving of serious scrutiny by all those concerned about the sort of State we see evolving all around us.