James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the Committee on the Rights of the Child, comprising independent experts, as the monitoring body for holding state parties to account regarding compliance with the convention. That process involves states submitting periodic reports to the committee and appearing before it for the purposes of discussing the report submitted.

Ireland’s most recent attendance before the committee was in 2006 and its most recent consolidated third and fourth report was submitted to the committee in July 2013. Ireland is scheduled to appear before the committee again in January 2016. While the actual meeting date has yet to be notified, it will occur between 11 and 29 January.

Before meeting individual state parties, the committee receives reports from, and meets, civil society interests and national rights monitoring bodies. These contacts inform the identification of issues the committee intends to discuss with the state party concerned. In Ireland’s case the committee met such interested parties, including a meeting with young people as facilitated by the Children’s Rights Alliance, last month.

To my Department's knowledge, the committee also received three parallel reports, from the Children’s Rights Alliance, from young people with the support of the alliance and from the Ombudsman for Children. The information gained from these sources has culminated in the recent receipt of a list of issues from the committee, regarding the combined third and fourth report of Ireland, to which the committee is seeking a written response by 15 October 2015. The committee has made clear that the list of issues is not intended to be exhaustive and it should not be interpreted as limiting or prejudicing the type and range of questions which members of the committee might wish to pose in January.

Given the breadth of the UN Convention, the committee’s scope of interest is very extensive and essentially covers the responsibilities and activities of most, if not all, Departments and many State agencies. Consequently, engagement with the committee involves a very considerable exercise of cross-government liaison and consultation around issues that are relevant to particular Departments or to a number of Departments. The co-ordination work is the responsibility of my Department. In that regard, it has established liaison arrangements with all Departments to process issues identified in the run-up to meeting the committee on which input from the individual Departments would be required. The current position is that my Department is preparing to communicate shortly with other Departments on the contents of the list of issues recently received from the committee.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade liaises closely with my Department to facilitate communications to and from the committee.

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