REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CHILDREN’S LAW CENTRE, BELFAST THURSDAY, 22ND FEBRUARY,2007
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CHILDREN’S LAW CENTRE, BELFAST THURSDAY, 22ND FEBRUARY,2007
Good morning everybody.
I would like to thank the Children’s Law Centre and especially Ms Paddy Kelly for the kind invitation to visit the Centre and to be here on the occasion of the launch of the leaflet ‘Do you know your rights about Family Law?’.
In his poem Autobiography, the great Ulster poet Louis MacNeice describes in a disturbing and graphic way the damaging, unobserved and neglected, internal turmoil of a child.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same…
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there…
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied…
This Centre exists to make sure somebody is there, someone who understands that beyond the idealised image of simple happy childhoods, there are some very tough and testing realities that are too much for a child or young person to bear alone. Many of those realities were explored last August when Belfast hosted the very important World Congress of the International Association of Youth & Family Judges and Magistrates. I am delighted to see some of the young people here today who participated in that World Congress last summer.
There is a saying that “what is learnt in childhood is engraved on stone”. It is a terrifying thought for a stone that is damaged by engraving can be thrown away and replaced. No such prospect exists for the child whose life is skewed at the hands of bad engravers. And all of us as adults have a role to play in the engraving process, probably the most serious role we are asked to play in our lives, whether it is in micro roles directly involvedin the lives of children, like parents, teachers, neighbours, professionals, or in macro roles as leaders of church and state or as members of civic society. For a very long time the damage caused by poor engravers was suffered in silence by children and cast long dark shadows over their adult lives. The silence has been broken in more recent years and thanks to the widening ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the championing of children’s rights by this Children’s Law Centre among others, the vindication of children’s rights has moved further and further up the agenda. Today children in the North have a Commissioner for Children and in the South a Children’s Ombudsman, both relatively new resources for children and, in a strong signal of changing times, children and young people were strongly involved in the process leading to both appointments. The United Nation’s Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva now carries out what are essentially periodic audits on the implementation of the Convention in each ratifying country and their reports are very useful tools by which we can measure progress in the promotion and protection of children’s rights and set priorities for even greater improvement .
Leonardo Da Vinci once summed up the value of action by saying, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” It is the very essence of the service offered here to children and young people. Here they are listened to, their views sought, valued, acted on, included. Here they have access to the information, knowledge and support they need to help them navigate the often very complex sets of circumstances which could so easily overwhelm them. Here they are helped to understand their rights and responsibilities in ways that are accessible and effective. The Centre’s website alone carries a vast and informative content but set out in a child-friendly manner, even a president-friendly manner as I can testify as one of the six million visitors to your website! That statistic alone says something about the importance of your role as teacher, educator, adviser, friend. The quality and presentation of the leaflet being launched here today is also very impressive in its respect for its target audience.
Thankfully the days of children being ‘seen and not heard’ are fast disappearing and again the Centre has been a powerful forum in which children and young people could form, shape and express their views on key issues in their lives, knowing that those views would be taken seriously and brought to the attention of the official engravers further up the line. Through conferences, training, research projects you have inspired young people to new levels of confident articulation and self-belief.
It is a truly dreadful thing to listen to an adult tell of his or her wasted childhood, to reflect too late on things that cost them dearly but which could have been mitigated or avoided if only they had been less ignorant, less vulnerable, less alone. For too many those gaps are gaping wounds that may never close over a lifetime but now their distilled experience, shared often courageously, is itself a resource helping all of us North and South East and West to build better more secure scaffolding around the lives of our children so that the engraving process is steady, sure, careful and caring. The law is an essential part of that scaffolding and it is far from being the easiest to understand. To many people it can seem impenetrable and to an already bewildered child, even more bewildering. The vocation of the Children’s Law Centre as a bridge to the law, as a surefooted guide through it is a reassuring sign that somebody cares, somebody is there and “silent terrors” are immediately replied to.
Thank you.