REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF XVII WORLD CONGRESS OF THE IAYFJM
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF XVII WORLD CONGRESS OF THE INTL ASSN OF YOUTH & FAMILY JUDGES & MAGISTRATES
Good morning Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justices, Lord Lieutenant, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
It is wonderful to see this important gathering taking place in my beautiful native city and I thank Justice John Gillen and the entire organising Committee for their invitation and for the enormous work which allows us to enjoy each other’s company, share our insight and experience and bring fresh energy to a crucial debate which every jurisdiction faces – how to take a fractured childhood and the many shards of damage it scatters in all directions and put the pieces together in a way that heals, redeems, restores, or simply works better than what went before.
You came to the right place to talk about putting the pieces together again for that is the story of contemporary Belfast – a city deeply damaged both physically and psychologically by violence, by division, by sectarianism, but now trying with huge heart to put the pieces together – not as they were before, as you might restore a broken vase - but in a way that makes Belfast a happy place, a safe place, a supportive and a welcoming place for all its citizens.
In an ideal world, that is what all families and all communities should be for children - happy places, safe places, places where they grow up to be resilient, confident, well-fed, well-educated, well-cared for, loved, the kind of people who in turn make good parents, good citizens, good neighbours and good friends. But no child chooses her parents, her country or her context. These are waiting at the end of the birth canal, to be faced, to be shaped, for better or for worse.
As President, one of the more pleasurable elements of my diary on a regular basis is visiting schools, including those catering for children with disabilities. On other occasions I present bravery awards to children who have achieved recognition, respect and admiration through the remarkable courage and resilience they have displayed in their young lives. It has made me particularly conscious of the profound challenges facing so many of our very young – challenges that present through illness, disadvantage, abuse, lack of opportunity and how their lived lives force them into realities beyond what their tender years should foist on them.
My grandmother often used an expression which she had reason to believe the truth of, “What’s learnt in childhood is engraved on stone.” The import of those words was brought home to me one day some years ago when we discovered a small spelling mistake on my grandfather’s granite headstone. I asked the engraver if it could be erased and was told that the engraving was too deep and the best answer to the problem would be to take the faulty headstone down and put up a new one. Those of us who are engravers on children’s lives - parents, teachers, leaders, carers, judges – we don’t get that option with our children. We get one go around. If we engrave well on those lives we can reveal their strengths and talents and foster the coping skills to deal with their fears and weaknesses. If we engrave badly the danger is that the damage is carried over a life and through a life. We can make or break a child’s future and a broken future can wreak havoc on individuals, on communities, on humanity itself.
Yet like the people who suffered in this city and who could have been forgiven at times for despairing of the future, we have to believe in the possibility of change, and the power of wise intervention, that can courageously and effectively face the ugly side which our world so often turns on children, and face it down, whatever form it takes: from parental abuse to self-harm; from institutionalised neglect to endemic poverty; from parental abduction across national boundaries to child runaways living rough; from internet predators to child slavery; from children who stray into lawlessness to young people for whom crime is a career. Your work places you dramatically in the problematic lives of children and young people – you see the results of their anger, their distress, their carelessness, their naiveté, their ignorance, their cocksuredness, their exploitation, their vulnerability, their stupidity, their corruption, their selfishness, and their innocence. And you see in front of them all sorts of cul-de-sacs, all sorts of lifelong messes, and you have this chance to do something, something that can help change the tide of their history and reconfigure the trajectory of their lives. It is an awesome responsibility you take on each day and you have brought here stories of success and stories of heartbreaking failure – each one of them a stepping stone to better answers tomorrow.
This conference presents us with an opportunity to reconsider and refreshen with new shared wisdom, how the law, in all its office but also in all its humanity, can work to diminish the fallout from those skewed lives. The international and multi-disciplinary nature of this audience provides this conference with a broad and deep well from which to draw. On the face of it, an argument could be made that some national contexts are so radically different that the scope for getting value from sharing experiences is limited, but a simple example from a recent visit I made to Africa would indicate that the reverse is true. The country in question is one of the poorest in the world and overwhelmed by Aids but, for the first time in its history with the help of money from the Irish Government, it is offering free universal primary education to its children. We in Ireland have reason to know what a convulsively era-changing event universal education can be, for it was the introduction of free second level education in the Republic in the late 1960’s which seed-bedded the Celtic Tiger economy and turned Ireland from the poorest member state of the Union in 1973 to one of the world’s richest nations in 2006. In the interactions between Irish NGOs and their counterparts in the particular African country, as they planned new schools and classrooms, old pedagogical methods, long since proven in classrooms here to inhibit rather than enhance learning, were gently nudged aside and teachers encouraged to try new ideas – for example to let the younger children sit around tables communally rather than in rows on tight benches, or to take down the large signs which listed the names of the so-called “slow-learners.” To see children so hungry for education that they travel three hours over the most hostile and remote mountain landscape to get to school, and three hours to get home, winter and summer, was an object lesson in the courage which life demands of so many children, and the courage they find so spontaneously. For these children go home to hunger and to mothers dying of Aids.
Ireland, as a member of the EU and the UN has long been wedded to the notion of a collective approach to common problems and the importance of international law as a vehicle for promulgating and vindicating children’s rights. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a minimum set of standards against which to test law, policy and practice as it affects children and Article 19 enshrines the right of those under eighteen to protection "from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse…"
To an endangered child, the Convention is only as useful a protection as people like you make it, turning words into action and aspiration into lived reality. Youth and family law is at the sharp end of the acute problem of how to balance and vindicate the rights of young people in conditions that are less than ideal, and often subject to capricious and destabilising forces far outside your control, and the control of the child or young person. You also face the task of how to persuade those young people, no matter how adverse their circumstances or perverse their behaviour, to buy into their own better futures, to become agents of change for the better in their own lives.
Across the world we are also becoming increasingly aware of the broadening nature of the concept of harm to children. The modern world has thrown up one new and particularly vicious exploitation of children as combatants. It has been estimated that there are at least 300,000 children under arms actively engaged in thirty-six armed conflicts around the world. Is it not imperative to reduce this dreadful abuse of children in conflict, both as victims and as perpetrators? How shameful is it that youth in so many parts of the world should be educated in means of committing acts of barbarism, acts of genocide, acts of awful cruelty, rather than in learning of respect for fellow man, respect for difference, tolerance, caring. Only last week the UN Secretary General drew attention to the plight of young girls and women in Darfur who are being subjected to abduction for forced labour or forced sex. Kofi Annan has called for national authorities to vigorously investigate and prosecute responsible parties and put in place measures for the protection of these most vulnerable people.
If life seems chaotic for the young people you deal with, if it presents them with dilemmas they cannot resolve or comprehend alone, you too, like all of us in the adult world, inhabit a world that is constantly changing, which you not only have to adjust to, but you also have to interpret for yourself and for society at large, for sometimes yours will be the first voice of authority to draw attention to underlying emerging social trends and their adverse consequences. Yours will be the voice to point up the inadequacy of communal coping systems. Yours will be the voice speaking for children who do not yet know the extent of their voicelessness or their vulnerability and who, too late, grow in awareness of their lost years and lost lives. And in conferences like this, yours will be the voice insisting that we regard that adult stewardship of children’s lives as utterly sacred and that we refuse to give in to the counsel of despair no matter how intractable the problems may seem.
In some ways all of us have to make up for lost ground. The 20th century brought great progress in equality for women and workers generally. I am not sure that the same can be said for our children. I would hope that the achievement of full human rights for children will be seen as the principal challenge of the 21st century and one that requires commitment at all levels.
Just as many of the world’s damaged children can, in adulthood, point to a person whose cruel intervention in their lives was the catalyst that sent them into freefall, so too, many of us who have been fortunate in our lives can point to a person whose benign intervention, at a crucial time, galvanised all our best instincts and helped guide us to safe harbours. It is my hope that you will be that benign intervention, that timely nudge that someday reveals itself in an adult life as
life-changing, life-enhancing. I hope that adult will see you as the person who, given the fragments of his or her life, carefully and humanely set about helping that child, that young person, to put the pieces back together, stronger than before, more robust than before and more hopeful than before. It’s as noble and necessary an endeavour as exists in our world. Thank you for making it your vocation and thank you for coming to Belfast to strengthen and re-energise that vocation.
You could not have come to a more inspirational place, for here, even as we speak, children are being born in Belfast’s maternity hospitals. They don’t know it yet but they are being born into prescribed contexts - Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist - and these labels will soon begin to set their lives on paths long travelled and once unhappily travelled. There were so many who believed it could not be done, but we give thanks for those who believed it could, and who worked and keep on working to give Belfast’s children a future to be proud of. I hope the mood inspires each of you as you share and listen over the coming days, and as you go back to your workplaces, champions for children and young people in a world that so often only hears their troubled cries too late. When you help the troubled children you help a troubled world. It doesn’t get more important, more crucial than that.
Thank you all very much.