Conflicting views on rights of disabled

At 10 a.m. today in Dublin Castle, Minister of State Mr Tom Kitt will open the fourth annual NGO Forum on Human Rights. At 6 p.m. the conference will close with a reception hosted by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell.

This is an official event, organised by the human rights unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs and involving a junior minister from each of the coalition parties. It is also a very worthy occasion, giving people active in human rights work a chance to engage with the politicians and diplomats.

What's really interesting, though, is that the keynote address will be delivered this morning by Prof Gerard Quinn, from NUI Galway. Prof Quinn is one of the leading international experts on the human rights of people with disabilities. He has been invited to set the tone for the forum because the human rights unit wants to highlight one of the very best aspects of its work.

Prof Quinn has been an important adviser to the Department on the move, initiated by Ireland, towards a United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

The Government has been taking the lead at UN level for some years in seeking to have an international convention on disabilities drawn up and agreed. Every year at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, our diplomats raise the subject and they have been gradually garnering support.

Prof Quinn's address will, therefore, be a chance to advertise something which adds greatly to our international image as a State which takes human rights seriously. If and when the UN convention is agreed, Ireland will rightly take much of the credit.

It seems odd, then, that the material inviting people to attend the forum omits any mention of disability. The programme for the forum simply says that Prof Quinn will deliver a "keynote address", without mentioning his subject.

The Department of Foreign Affairs website says: "A number of human rights issues will be addressed in panel format, including: the forthcoming World Conference Against Racism, issues relating to human security, human rights and development, incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic legislation and compliance with international human rights instruments."

All of these issues will indeed be on the agenda, and it may be that the failure to mention the issue of a UN convention on disability rights is purely accidental. Or it may be that just now this is the last issue the Government wants to be discussed in an official forum.

This is because the justified pride which one arm of government can take in its efforts to enshrine the rights of people with disabilities in international law sits uneasily with the actions of another arm of government in seeking to limit those same rights.

During the week, Prof Quinn himself was highly critical of the Supreme Court judgement in the Jamie Sinnott case. If he alludes to that case this morning the embarrassment will be obvious. The Government will be exposed as street angels and house devils, urging the world at large to adopt an idea which it opposes at home.

Mr Kitt and Ms O'Donnell might have to face the questions which Government politicians have been avoiding all week as they seek to withstand the pressure for a recall of the Dail to discuss the outcome of the case.

The potential for this embarrassment has long been there. Ireland's record on respecting the rights of people with disabilities simply doesn't stand up to international scrutiny. In 1998, for example, a UN committee looking at the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child expressed its concern "about the lack of a national policy to ensure the rights of children with disabilities and the lack of adequate programmes and services addressing the mental health of children and their families" in Ireland.

Any country which doesn't like the Irish proposals for a UN convention on disability rights has the prefect argument: look at Ireland. Here is a Government which took on a disabled man and his mother and won. Here is a Government which explicitly sought and obtained a ruling that people with disabilities have no right to a basic education beyond the age of 18.

Here is a Minister for Education who asks that mother, as Dr Woods asked Ms Kathryn Sinnott during the week, to trust him with her son's future even though the State had grossly neglected him for 20 years. Here is a State whose Government will begin next week to fight a succession of further court cases against children with autism and their parents.

The aim of the Government in all of this is to retain a position where the needs of people with disabilities can be met as and when the State sees fit, and not as a matter of rights.

No one believes that acknowledging these rights would automatically make things better or remove the practical difficulty of delivering the necessary services. Even the rights that were acknowledged by the Supreme Court to an education up to the age of 18 are, for very many children with disabilities, still very far from being vindicated in practice.

Having rights guaranteed in the Constitution and in legislation, however, changes the balance of power. It forces the State to tailor services to the needs of the person rather than the other way around. That is precisely why the Department of Foreign Affairs wants those rights to be written into international law.

And why the Departments of Health and Education wants them kept out of Irish law.

fotoole@irish-times.ie