Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank Senator van Turnhout for bringing this matter to the House.

In 1994, 20 years ago, a man called Neil Postman wrote a book called The Disappearance of Childhood. In the opening of his book he wrote:

As I write, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are amongst the highest-paid models in America. In advertisements in all the visual media, they are presented to the public in the guise of knowing and sexually enticing adults, entirely comfortable in the milieu of eroticism.

Little did he know then that would now be happening to five, six and seven-year olds. He continued:

This perception of children as miniature adults is reinforced by several trends besides criminal trends. For example, the increased level of sexual activity among children has been fairly well documented.

The media industry, the Internet industry, the music and video industry have played a huge and defining role in the drive to erase the differences between child and adult sexuality. Television in particular holds the entire population enthralled and in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses, on a daily basis, the egalitarianism of sexual fulfilment regardless of age or profile. Sex is the greatest industry in the world and more lucrative than oil. It is available to everybody at any time at any place and is becoming ageless. It has now transformed from a private and profound adult mystery to a product that is available on shelves in a store like mouthwash or deodorant. Adult Language is used by children, adult profanity is used by children and filthy words are used by children. One can hear such words used comfortably and profusely even by children as young as six years old. It is a significant fact because it is another example of the erosion of the traditional distinction between children and adults. The media has been outstanding in producing a lowered state of language competence in the young. Homogeneity of style, food games and clothing removes the gap consistently between adults and children. Mum dresses like daughter and daughter dresses like mum so there is no age gap in children's clothing. Nine-year old boys wear three piece suits to birthday parties and 60-year old men wear jeans; nine-year old girls wear high heels and adults wear sneakers.

Senator van Turnhout was right and I agree with her that every child has a right to play. In the 18th century Rousseau wrote avidly about their right to play and that their natural environment should be free from contamination. Froebel and Maria Montessori following his ideas in the 19th century by saying that children learn naturally through play. It is the total sum of their selves and it is through play that their total identity becomes manifest but if we look at some city based primary schools - one of which my son attended - there is no place provided for children to play. Imagine the planning and the priorities that went into that situation and the insurance companies that benefit and feed off such a situation. At times our housing estates are no better.

Children's toys are now the instruments to push, propel, profit from and adultify children. Play has now been sabotaged by the intervention, direction and control of adults which is what beauty pageants are all about. They brainwash people and provide distilled examples of a belief that children are equal to adults when they can never be equal. Child beauty pageants see children as sophisticated consumers. They are the greatest example of a brilliant infiltration into children's natural play by adults for adults in order to make children part of or an extension of the adult world. They are adult play but they are not children's play. Children need to control their own space and not be confined to what adults understand and accept as sensual or sexy. It is another word for child labour that was outlawed in the 1830s. I can call such pageants child labour because they do not shelter children from adult corruption and how adults see and respond to the world or buy into how their world should be.

Child beauty pageants are adult controlled ways of shaping children and create social learning skills around adult anticipatory physical behaviour. They are also a contradiction of the word beauty because beauty is best described by Gerard Manley Hopkins who said that it is the possession of God who is "beauty's self and beauty's giver". Beauty is never tired or cliched or a semi-sexual attempt to look leery with a kind of jaded attention within an adult world through the use of make-up, clothes or hair and it is not pouting, pointing, leaning or looking lasciviously. All of this behaviour at child beauty pageants is very simply about the power and control of children's play which is organised, orientated and lived through by adults as part of their world. Beauty pageants are not a mode of expression. They are a mode of social and sexual control.

I started my contribution by quoting the great Neil Postman - who died too young - and will end with him because he said that the big question for all of us is what to do about the disappearance of childhood. He said: "I do know the answer. I say this with a mixture of relief and dejection. The relief comes from my not having the burden of instructing others on how to live their lives". I cannot answer either. My imaginative reach for solutions like Postman may not go farther than my grasp of the problem. His dejection came from the same source:

To have to stand and wait while the charm, malleability, innocence and curiosity of children are degraded and then transmogrified into the lesser features of pseudo-adulthood is painful and embarrassing and above all, sad.

I cannot prevent it but can only tell Senators why it occurs.

Child beauty pageants should be banned. Rousseau influenced the French Revolution so we should be influenced by the French nation and ban them. It is as simple as that.