Irish children were never better off materially, yet they've never been more battered and beaten. On Sunday, Robin Leahy joined some 18 other children killed by their parents over the last two years. Irish children were ranked 10th in the world at risk of accidental or intentional death when Unicef, the United Nations' children's education fund, published child death tables earlier this year. Why has prosperity not made children safe? Disrespect is flourishing.
The courts this week heard cases about a toddler burned to death and an infant condemned to cerebral palsy because he was smothered to the point of brain damage. Refugee and asylum-seeking children live in conditions below the standards set out in UN conventions, and well below what any first-world State ought tolerate, according to Wednesday's report.
The rate of physical abuse against children has increased by some 15 per cent in the last two years. Yet as definitive figures are not kept, no one knows how many more children are currently suffering violence in their families. Nor do they know the additional emotional, sexual and intellectual abuses children endured over the same time, partly because the social services are overwhelmed by the volume of urgent cases, as Rois∅n Shortall, the Labour TD, highlighted this summer.
As well as being battered and beaten in growing numbers across classes, Irish children overall top the EU league of relative poverty. July's report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that although things are improving, the rate at which Irish children experience rises in living standards is slower than anyone else.
Many disabled children are effectively denied equality of educational opportunity, and those whose parents challenge the system, such as Kathryn and Jamie Sinnott, find it ruthlessly resistant to change. Meanwhile, able-bodied children leave school with among the lowest literacy rates in Europe.
A full year has passed since the Government launched the welcome National Children's Strategy, to much hugging, kissing, and taking of photo-opportunities. The strategy generated events such as Dβil na n╙g, and a National Children's Office was set up. But the Office is still awaiting adequate resources and a statutory footing, as promised, so it has no real muscle yet. The Children's Ombudsman's legislation, postponed from the Dβil's summer session, is now promised for before Christmas. Only the most urgent priority ranking will make it a legal reality before the end of the current Dβil.
The gap between words and deeds remains wide. The Taoiseach and Tβnaiste, and the Minister for Children, Mary Hanafin, said 12 months ago that they were committed to eliminating child poverty. Isn't everyone? Yet, there are no indications that the imminent National Anti-Poverty Strategy will deliver child-specific timescales that could make a real difference to children now.
Eight years ago, Catherine McGuinness, then a barrister, now a judge, recommended constitutional change after her investigation into the Kilkenny incest case.
"We believe the Constitution should contain a specific and overt declaration of the rights of born children," she wrote. "We feel that the very high emphasis on the rights of the family in [Articles 41 and 42 of] the Constitution may consciously or unconsciously be interpreted as giving a higher value to the rights of parents than to the rights of children. "The Constitutional Review Group amplified this call in 1996, yet although a body of legislation on children's rights is slowly being developed, as Frank Martin shows in The Politics of Children's Rights, Ireland remains behind international best practice and its politicians' promises.
The State paid lip-service to the born by ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but has resisted incorporating it into Irish law lest it undermine existing constitutional and legal customs. The only amendment planned by this Government deals with the unborn.
The rhetoric says children are our most precious asset. The evidence points to the contrary. A crisis in child places from daycare to custodial units threatens the well-being and life potential of thousands of Irish children. While enlightened governments across Europe are banning corporal punishment of children in the home, the Irish Government has consistently refused to articulate a position on smacking children, or on defining when a smack becomes abuse. In the absence of an advocacy system for children, it is left to judges and lobby groups to make the case for change.
Some argue that better rights for children are anti-family, because policing them would lead to unwelcome and inappropriate intervention by the State. But in the hierarchy of traditional family power, the child inevitably comes last, and those who are least powerful are inevitably most open to abuse.
Ireland has invested heavily in the fantasy of the perfect family, and in a myth of autonomous family life in which parents and children live without conflict. Yet resistance to improving the rights of the child in Ireland may foster a culture where abuses are tolerated by default. Robin Leahy's killing is at the extreme end of a spectrum where the rights of children are subversient to their parents'.
Legally, children are not objects and not their parents' property; practically, the State prefers to tinker round on the surface rather than challenge the myths that make abuses flourish.
mruane@irish-times.ie