Change in Constitution urged to guarantee rights of the underprivileged

The Constitution should be amended to guarantee explicitly the social and economic rights of the underprivileged, a former president of the High Court has told a conference in Dublin.

Mr Justice Declan Costello said that Article 40, which obliges the State to protect the citizen's personal rights, had in practice done little to protect the rights of those who were deprived and marginalised in society.

At a conference organised by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he said it had been accepted by subsequent conventions that the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the declaration could be achieved only when economic, social and cultural rights were also guaranteed.

But he added: "In the opinion of many, there are gross inequalities in Irish society today which are remediable". A large minority lived below the poverty line; international capitalism and market forces increased national wealth but were indifferent to its distribution; services for some of the most deprived in our community - including the poor, the mentally handicapped, young offenders, and the travelling community - were "chronically inadequate".

Sixty years of constitutional adjudication by the courts had shown that Article 40 was not adequate to redress the imbalance, while the consensus was that the courts had enhanced protection of the basic rights included in the Constitution. He added: "There is no reason to assume that the enjoyment of the economic and social rights of the underprivileged and deprived would not likewise be enhanced if they too were constitutionally protected."

The one-day conference was opened by the President, Mrs McAleese, who said that at the end of a "difficult century", in which Ireland had faced complex issues ranging from Partition to the inequality of women, there were now two new and major challenges. One was the new-found wealth and the question of sharing it fairly; the other was the Belfast Agreement, which was forcing us to acknowledge "our individual and collective responsibility for building the new culture of consensus".

Although many people were already bored with "the hype of millenniumitis", the prospect of the new millennium was one way of forcing us to think about the sort of society we wanted to see. "Wouldn't it be nice to look at an Ireland that is peaceful and reconciled, that embraces diversity in creed, culture and gender, and has a space for everyone to have what is rightfully theirs?"

Dr Duncan Morrow of the University of Ulster told the conference that "liberal, democratic norms and human rights assumptions" had been an enormous force for restraint during the North's 30 years of troubles, which had always held the potential to become a "Bosnia-style war to the death".

"It never happened, largely because the UK and the Republic of Ireland did not act in Northern Ireland like Serbia and Croatia did in Bosnia, or Turkey and Greece in Cyprus, and the values of human rights and Christian prescriptions against killing continued to have powerful backers. To contort Yeats, the centre did not actually dissolve, although it was a close-run thing at times."

Prof Margaret MacCurtain of UCD said the 1948 declaration was "the most revolutionary document of the century - in the main unsuspected by the diplomats who voted for it".

And yet at the end of the century, Christians found themselves faced with the same crisis that Jewish thinkers faced after the Holocaust. The Jews had had to reconcile "their traditional belief in God as the lord of history with such a colossal crime against them". Now Christians had to live with the potential "of nuclear or biological war" to destroy the planet while trying to preach "a gospel of hope".