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>> JANE DONNELLY: Well we've made twelve submissions; I was actually surprised
when I saw that put down.
There were some months there that we had two submissions;
and the reason that we make submissions is that Ireland has ratified
various UN and
Council of Europe Conventions.
And the Dáil has ratified them, and they have said -
by ratifying these conventions, they have said that we can have these rights;
they have agreed to give us
the rights that are in those conventions.
Before we came along
the state
went to
the UN and Council of Europe
and said that
everyone in Ireland has these rights;
but we're there now making submissions saying we don't have these rights.
And we have the Irish Human Rights Commission as well and they're - they have
made a huge
report in the last year
which sets out the failures of the state to protect the rights
of minorities and in particular the non-religious.
So I just - will I list them?
I'll just go through them. In June
we had - you know, the Minister for Education
had set up a Forum on Patronage and Pluralism.
Well, we made a submission to that.
We should have been
at the forum
and I think there were seven groups -
seven main representatives, they were called
of all of the groups in Ireland, but three of those were Catholic
and we did complain about that - that we weren't part of the main group
and they
took us in
at a later date and we had half an hour with the forum - that's all.
And if you see the Census results this week
we were the second largest group in society after Roman Catholics and there was
three Catholic
representatives
on that group and we weren't there at all
so we complained about that
and said that wasdiscrimination.
We did -- they did make an effort to include us more after that
but we had to make the -- we had to point it out to them.
And, em,
in August as well we made a submission to the Catholic Schools partnership on
em,
enrollment policies and all that.
We never got an acknowledgement or anything that we'd sent that one,
but we did it.
We, em --
This is one of the UN conventions - submission to the
government; the government make a report to the UN
on each one of the conventions and they brought all the various
bodies in society; all the civil society organisations in
to have a look at the report
and to make a submission on their report before it went over to the UN
and we did that, but we're also going to get the opportunity of making a report
to the UN
on the state report.
We haven't got a date when the state is to appear before
the UN; they'll go over to Geneva
but our submission will be in there and we'll have that done
and, eh
There was also the
Department of Education had a framework for giving in submissions
on the school enrollment. As you know that minorities
do not have equality of access to the local school because of the Equal
Status Act and that is one -- the major human rights principle is
that under the human right to education, that children should have
a right to access to their local school without discrimination of any kind
And we're not inclined to put that in --
say that that is religious discrimination - but it is religious
discrimination.
We made a
submission to that
and
then there was this whole -- the issue of the United Nations under the Universal
Periodic Review. We made a couple of smaller ones to civil organisations.
under that -
The Irish Council of Civil Liberties, Amnesty International and we made one ourselves to
the UN.
And it's up on the UN website.
And then we made a submission on the new Human Rights and Equality Commission. In
December we made a
submission to the report on the Forum
on Patronage and Pluralism.
And that's up on our website
and --
the submission to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance.
They were over - they sent a delegation over here in February,
and we met the delegation.
They came over with
a committee on the framework Convention on Protection of National Minorities and we
met them as well.
And we made submissions
to both those organisations.
And em (I'll speak about that later)
And
There's another one. Number ten is a submission to the state report
under another UN Convention and again we will have an opportunity
to make a submission to the UN on that
and we might even think --
there's a whole process - you can go over there as well and we might look at
that as well.
And on number eleven: the National Council of Curriculum
and Assessment - there was only a small submission; they'd only let us have,
I think, a hundred words on that but we made the most of them;
and, em,
then of course we made
submissions to the OSCE when we went over there a couple of weeks ago.