The appointment of Mary Robinson as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ireland's election last year to the UN Human Rights Commission, and the commitments in the Good Friday Agreement should have ushered in a whole new era for human rights in Ireland. But so far there has been more promise than performance.
Successive Irish governments have always prided themselves on the State's good human rights record. Ireland was one of the 10 original parties to the European Convention on Human Rights and one of the first countries to allow its citizens to take individual complaints to Strasbourg.
But since that time Ireland has tended to fall behind in the human rights stakes. As other countries not only ratified the European Convention on Human Rights but incorporated it into their domestic law, thus making it easier for the citizen to access, Ireland hung back. And now that Britain has decided to incorporate the Convention, Ireland will be the only state in the European Union that has not done so.
Our record on the UN human rights conventions has been less than inspiring. We were slow to ratify the keynote Convention on Civil and Political Rights and Ireland is now one of the few democratic countries in the world not to have ratified the UN Conventions Against Torture and for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Successive governments have earnestly explained that it is not their policy to ratify conventions until all the necessary legislation is in place. But there has been no rush to put the legislation in place and, in fact, we still have no law prohibiting racial or ethnic discrimination outside the workplace.
It is sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that we are all for human rights until those rights are actually needed. For instance, the Oireachtas passed a humane, if less than perfect, Refugee Act in 1996. But as soon as the tiny trickle of asylum seekers reaching our shores turned into a small stream, the new Act was dumped and Ministers had no problem explaining that rights that should be accorded to a few dozen people could not possibly be given to a couple of thousand.
Successive governments have been good at sending delegations to international human rights conferences and signing up to high sounding resolutions without doing much about the commitments contained in them. Ireland enthusiastically endorsed the Vienna Declaration and Programme for Action adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. And the Government also signed up to the Beijing Programme for Action after the World Conference on Women's Rights in 1995.
Both documents urged signatories to establish national Human Rights Commissions as part of the UN's human rights strategy. Ireland seemed to endorse this call as well. The Government has funded the work of Mary Robinson's special adviser on Human Rights Commissions and even sponsored a resolution at the UN Human Rights Commission earlier this year calling for the establishment of such commissions. But there was no sign of any move to establish a Human Rights Commission in Ireland until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which made it part of the Northern peace settlement.
The prestige of the appointment of our former President as the world's top human rights official has put a little extra pressure on the Government to fulfil all its international obligations. But when parish pump prejudices clash with the UN High Commissioner's ideals, the parish pump still wins out. Mary Robinson's moving plea at the Department of Foreign Affairs' Human Rights Forum earlier this year that we should share some of the benefits of the Celtic Tiger with asylum-seekers and refugees seems to have fallen on profoundly deaf ears.
The Good Friday Agreement may change some of this. It contains a powerful set of human rights commitments for both sides of the Border. The Irish Government promised to re-examine the question of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights, set up a Human Rights Commission, implement Employment Equality and Equal Status legislation, and ratify the European Framework Convention on protecting National Minorities.
The Government also promised to "normalise" security arrangements and review the Offences Against the State Act in tandem with the British government's pledge to remove emergency legislation in the North.
This is an ambitious and welcome programme if it is carried through. The Human Rights Commission in particular should have a remit much wider than the Northern question if it is based on the UN's Paris Principles for such institutions. Hopefully it will have something fairly trenchant to say about the treatment of asylum-seekers and the lack of any anti-racism legislation in the Republic.
But even if the commitments in the Agreement are impressive, it cannot all be left to the governments from here on in. The rushing through of harsh new post-Omagh emergency legislation just four months after the signing of an Agreement that promised to remove emergency legislation suggests that the two governments have not yet grasped that human rights are for the bad times as well as the good, and perhaps especially for the bad times.
The human rights community and NGOs will have to keep up constant pressure in order to turn the promises of the Good Friday Agreement into practice.
Michael Farrell is co-chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and an NGO member of the Joint Department of Foreign Affairs/NGO Standing Committee on Human Rights