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Cóir Date: 25.02.2010 Parents for Children (PFC) have warned that the proposals brought forward to amend Article 42 of the Constitution could transfer power from parents to the State to the detriment of children. Writing in a letter to the Irish Times, PFC spokeswoman Maria Mhic Meanmain said:
Madam,
I am glad to see that The Irish Times has called for a debate on the proposed referendum on children, given that the committee proposing these changes ignored the views of parents when bringing forward this proposal.
There are several important sections of this proposal that require debate; where parents need to take centre stage. These include the questions: 1. Why has the term “exceptional cases” been removed, if not to make it easier for the State to seize children? 2. Why does the State want this expanded power considering the dreadful record it has in caring for children taken from families, as we’ve seen from the Ryan report and elsewhere? 3. Why are married parents being demonised? 4. Is our marital commitment to be seen as suspicious and dangerous?
This State has fought parents who tried to get their autistic children appropriate education, closed down children’s wards in our hospitals, removed special-needs assistants from classrooms, reduced child benefit and scrapped the early childhood supplement. Clearly child welfare is far from the top of the Government’s agenda. Parents cannot trust this State to vindicate the rights of our children.
It was reported in this paper recently that there has been an increase in the number of children taken into care because families are struggling to deal with the recession. Is being poor now an offence? Will this new proposal see us return to the practices of the 1950s, where children were taken from families only because those families were poor and then placed in institutions where they were abused?
Why is this being portrayed as a virtuous shifting of balance between the rights of the family and the rights of the child, when it is in fact a shifting of the balance between the rights of the family and the power of the State? There are times when children need protection. Let us not confuse that with endangering even more of our children who are loved and cared for by their parents.
Writing on the same subject in The Irish Times journalist John Waters said that the only “equality” created by the proposal would be, “the equal right of all parents to have their children snatched by the State”, adding that: “Irish children need to be protected, but history tells us that mainly they need to be protected from the State”.
Read more at: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0219/1224264799796.html
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