Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Economic, social and cultural rights help ensure a better quality of life for people. They guarantee basic dignities, including workers' rights, protection for families, and recognising the importance of cultural activities. These rights are a legal and moral tool to fight endemic injustices in our society, to address homelessness, to cut health care waiting lists, to end direct provision, to give all people with disabilities the dignity they deserve, and to seriously respond to the climate crisis.

Former President and UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson has stated:

A culture is not an abstract thing. It is a living, evolving process. The aim is to push beyond standard-setting and asserting human rights to make those standards a living reality for people everywhere.

This Bill is a manifestation of those words. Its purpose is to give citizens the opportunity to decide on this matter. I thank Deputy Pringle for bringing it forward for a third time.

While the two main Government parties seem to oppose economic, social and cultural rights, it is astonishing to me that they would defy people the right to vote on them. Again, I have to ask whose interests does this Government serve.

Over the past two weeks this House has discussed the catalogue of abuses endured by survivors of mother and baby institutions. The report, despite its many flaws, presents an account of the crimes and abuses carried out by agents of this State and of religious orders: abduction, concealment of death, illegal adoption, assault, gross neglect, not to mention years of denial, as well as the disgraceful hostile treatment of victims and survivors by public services.

The mother and baby institutions are a very real and very Irish example of why we need stronger rights. These institutions of horror were allowed under our current Constitution and by laws passed by our predecessors.

Part of our response to the mother and baby homes report and the pleas for justice from survivors must be to put in place the legal structures to ensure that people get real justice and that this can never happen again. Irish history and current affairs are a testament to the need for more robust rights. Regrettably, the actions of the current Government underline the need for these rights.

It is only the general data protection regulation, GDPR, that has guaranteed survivors of mother and baby institutions rights to access their own information. Before Christmas, people who were in these institutions and their families had to endure weeks of confusion and insults as the Government, which had not engaged with them, passed a Bill that made no mention of survivors rights and did nothing to alter the so-called sealing of records.

It was thanks to survivors' bravery and massive public outrage that the Government acknowledged survivors' rights to their personal data. However, it was only GDPR, that is, EU law, that legally guaranteed that. Without these rights the Government would have continued - it is still trying to continue - to hide behind outdated laws. That is the reason we need economic, social, and cultural rights and it seems this is why the Government has opposed these rights for so long.

Constitutional recognition of the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights can help resolve the many injustices that we face in Ireland today. Housing is one of the clearest examples. Ireland has been experiencing a sustained housing and homelessness crisis for almost a decade. Despite Government announcement after announcement and hundreds of millions of euro going into the housing assistance payment, HAP, we still have more than 8,000 official homeless people, including almost 2,500 children as of November.

Within a single generation, a consistent housing emergency has been created by Government policy. This current policy is denying people the right to a home. Thousands of families need a right to housing to move beyond rhetoric to reality. Surely, as a society, we consider it more important that children have a permanent home rather than developers making more money. State policy must have the goal of building affordable housing to buy and rent at the heart of it. That should not even need to be said in this House.

When the parents of my generation bought homes, the average price was three times the average annual income. Within a generation, that has slipped away, and the average house price has climbed to nine or ten times the average annual income.

A right to a home, made real by policy, and the elimination of homelessness should be a core aim of the Government. The present Government and its predecessor have proven month after month that it is only a constitutional right that will force the Government to provide the thousands of homes needed to end this crisis.

The UN covenant has strong provisions on decent and secure work. Work, for too many people, especially younger people, is insecure and low paid. That has a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities, migrants and women and is a large contributor to our shocking gender pay gap.

A right to do decent and secure work is a fair aspiration. A right to decent work would start with a living wage, as the minimum. The programme for Government mentions promises on a living wage but no practicalities. There is zero urgency from the Government to address the widespread prevalence of low pay. In fact, the Government rejected a Social Democrats motion on workers' rights last year. It is an uncomfortable truth that many of the jobs deemed most essential in this pandemic fall on people who are paid too little and experience job insecurity or those who are paid nothing at all.

Economic, social and cultural rights will also help realise just climate action. We need a clear path and a clear timetable on cutting carbon emissions. That needs to be treated as a national emergency, not as an afterthought and political football. We need a genuinely just transition, which changes every aspect of how we organise our economy. Making individuals responsible for climate action will not suffice when the big polluters need to be tackled and real structural change is so blatantly required.

The Earth our young people will inherit needs to be a liveable planet. If the next generation could vote now, I suspect there would be a more meaningful attempt to tackle the biggest emergency imaginable. We need politics to be for the next generation and not just the next election.

The explicit recognition of cultural rightswould help address our national hypocrisy regarding the arts. Our rich heritage and culture is celebrated by Governments and used to attract tourists but dependable jobs for artists and musicians are practically non-existent, our built heritage is allowed to crumble away or be sold to developers and our arts education is disgracefully underfunded. An enshrining of cultural rights would help our arts and heritage to get the support they deserve, would value our traditions and creative expression and would help artists and musicians make a living in Ireland.

The Government has voted against extending maternity leave, improving workers' rights, and giving proper pay to front-line healthcare workers. The Government is failing to take real climate action and give real justice to survivors of institutional abuse. We need stronger rights to prevent these injustices. Recent changes to the Constitution like marriage equality and abortion rights have demonstrated that people are ahead of the Government, in significant numbers, and when we could, we voted to ensure a more progressive and equitable society. When this question is put to the people, it will pass in a similar fashion. Our citizens recognise the importance of rights to housing, healthcare, better working conditions, justice and our cultural identity. These are important rights to ensure we have the type of society of which we can all be proud, where people have a roof over their heads, can earn a fair day's wage and can access healthcare and where music, art and heritage are truly valued. It is up to the Government to allow the people to have this choice. I hope the Government parties respect our citizens and democracy enough to make this happen.

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