A CHANGE in consciousness is required in Irish society to facilitate a culture in which children would be able to develop creatively, presidential candidate Michael D Higgins has said.
Giving the closing address at the Merriman Summer School, he said the debate about the rights of children could get stuck at a particular point where it was solely about protection. “But protecting children is very short of allowing the child to develop,” he said.
Constitutional change on children’s rights needed to be accompanied by legislative change but, in turn, that needed administrative change. Advocacy groups sometimes stopped short when they were promised legislation or when it was passed.
“It is how it is administered that matters.” If children’s rights were to be built into a version of a real republic, there also had to be a change in public consciousness. He said he sometimes felt the human rights movement was “sinking under a great burden of legal thinking” when it needed to be informed by all the social sciences.
“We are simply not getting out of that narrow stranglehold,” he said. Protecting children had to be a guarantee but a truly inclusive republic needed a real change in policy and consciousness.
He said intergenerational and inter-communal solidarity would overcome Ireland’s present difficulties, which had come about due to “extreme individualism”, with children sometimes viewed as “consumption vehicles”.
“We need to get to a new place.
“I really worry at times about aspects of the culture when I see little children going for First Communion dressed as brides in carriages. What has that got to do with anything spiritual and does it respect the child?”
He added: “It is important that we try to engage with the life-world of children, allowing for their insights into the constructions of their social world.
“You really are speaking about the elimination of fear from the experience of the child as the most fundamental obstacle for the achievement of a wonderful life.”
He said it was past time to give real meaning to the 1916 Proclamation phrase, “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”.
“There are many respects in which all that happened following the foundation of the State contradicted such an aim.
“The society that was inherited, and which was continued, was an unequal one. Society is still deeply unequal today. To make such a change, as would ‘cherish[ing] all of the children of the nation equally’, would require such a change in consciousness as would be deeply challenging to many of the assumptions which are central to Irish society,” Mr Higgins said.
The director of the summer school, Prof Nóirin Hayes of DIT, a founder member of the Children’s Rights Alliance, said children reflected their wider society’s behaviour and values. Adults should avoid becoming passive targets of children’s perceived problems and difficulties and, instead, become “the active arrows” that guide children through childhood.
“Irish children today are as strong as the supports that we and society can give them. They remain trusting of us to support them and guide them, and they are strong and resilient but they need to be listened to.”