Speech by President Catherine Connolly at ICCL 50th Anniversary Event
Leinster Hotel, Lower Mount Street, Dublin, Wednesday, 25th February, 2026
A chairde, it is an honour to be with you today, as President of Ireland, as we celebrate the significant milestone of 50 years since the establishment of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
My thanks to the Council’s Executive Director Joe O’Brien for your invitation to be with you today on this special occasion.
In marking five decades of defending human rights in Ireland since its founding in 1976, it is important to pay tribute to the Council’s founders, the late Kader Asmal and Mary Robinson. It took bravery, courage and determination to take on the State and those in positions of power – virtues that define your ongoing work, captured in your mandate to speak truth to power, especially when it is unpopular or difficult.
It is important to recall the context of the 1970s when the Council was established. It was a time of deep social conservatism: homosexuality was a criminal offence, while contraception, divorce and abortion were effectively prohibited.
The 1970s saw draconian emergency laws enacted in response to the escalation of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The decade was also marked by a crisis in Irish policing, characterised by reports of excessive force and brutality by certain members of An Garda Síochána against suspects in custody. There was no independent Garda complaints procedure in place, nor was there a proper system of legal aid in both civil and criminal cases.
It was in this context that the ICCL was established. Kader Asmal, the architect of the South African Bill of Rights, summed up the newly formed Irish Council for Civil Liberties to a gathering by stating:
“This Council is being formed to promote human rights, to protect civil liberties, recover them where they have been removed, and enlarge them where they have been diminished.”
Later Mary Robinson would elaborate on how the challenges facing the Council were two-fold: to create political and personal space in Ireland through reform of the Constitution and laws, and to affirm standards of civil liberties in the context of the increasing violence in Northern Ireland.
To these ends, over the 50 years since its foundation, the Council has produced a library of reports and submissions on a broad range of topics including police reform, fair trials and due process, victims’ rights and judicial reform. On social reform, you have campaigned on a broad range of issues, including justice for the Magdalenes, the legalisation of contraception, reproductive rights, homosexuality, divorce, racism, censorship and privacy.
That library is an invaluable resource from which I and many others draw on a regular basis. Without a doubt, this body of work has clearly influenced public policy and continues to do so and indeed to enrich and inform our public discourse.
Your current focus includes recommendations on the Artificial Intelligence Bill, rights for trans and non-binary people, and the right to peaceful protest.
Significantly, of course we see the right to protest being challenged in Europe and around the world, worryingly so in states that pride themselves on their democratic values. Freedom of expression and assembly are fundamental and must be protected and not suppressed by force. The right to respectfully but robustly challenge the establishment, the State itself, must remain inviolable.
Yet we see the most powerful democratic nations turning their backs on these basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. In the space of 80 years since the UN Charter, the international discourse has moved away from the crystal-clear language of universal rights to the crystal-clear language of ‘might is right’.
The consequences of this are clear. Countries can be invaded at will without UN backing, or threatened with invasion. Countries can be brought to their knees with indiscriminate sanctions to satisfy the whims of a powerful state. The UN and other organisations undertaking invaluable work in dangerous locations can be defunded and abolished on a whim or designated as terrorist organisations – multilateralism undermined on a constant basis.
Guarantees that were meant to apply to all human beings are being recast as privileges, granted to some or withheld from others. We hear of suffering being described in qualified language, atrocities being named in a passive voice, obligations replaced with 'concerns', and deliberate violations of law denied or treated with impunity. It is language and behaviour stripped of conscience, morality and not based on international law. Language no longer protects the vulnerable; it simply records their fate.
We have to ask ourselves how this has come to be, what role have we played in allowing this to happen, and what role might we play in shining a spotlight on the debasement of language and the erosion of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Given our history, Ireland is uniquely placed as an independent, sovereign and neutral state to lead out on a rational and meaningful public discourse that re-centres human rights and international law as the bedrock of our shared humanity.
Your conference, on the theme of “human rights and democratic backsliding in the EU: challenges to the European Court of Human Rights Framework”, could not be more timely in a world where an unprecedented number of judges have felt obliged to remind us of the very basic doctrine of the separation of powers.
May I conclude by congratulating and thanking all the Council staff, Board members and supporters, past and present, for their courageous hard work over five decades, for their advocacy as a constant defender of human rights and for speaking truth to power without fear or favour. We owe you an enormous debt of gratitude.
I wish you continued success for the next 50 years.