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	Gormley Seeks Vote on Children's Rights Irish Times June 12, 2009 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0612/breaking11.htm Minister for Environment and Green Party leader John Gormley has made a fresh call for a referendum on children's rights. Speaking during the Dáil debate on the Ryan report, Mr Gormley described said the abuse in Religious-run institutions in Ireland was "without precedent in 20th Century western democracies". He said: "We managed to not just institutionalise but to industrialise child abuse and neglect. It became systemic and systematic. Children's homes became factories that produced broken people." Mr Gormley said the "greatest monument" that the current generation could leave was to enshrine children's rights in the Constitution through a referendum and constitutional amendment. "We have been talking about and debating this issue for more than four years in this House. The time for debate I believe is now over," he said. The previous government recommended a change to the Constitution to strengthen the rights of children over three years ago. The Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, which is due to report in September, is understood to be still considering the terms of the proposed change. The Dáil is holding a special sitting today to conclude its debate on the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. The debate is expected to finish this evening. Yesterday, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said the report "has shone a powerful light into probably the darkest corner of the history of the State". Mr Cowen said the report "radically changed" the public's perception of what went on in the institutions and has "vindicated once and for all" former residents. He said: "What it has revealed must be a source of the deepest shame to all of us. Mr Cowen said a plan to implement the commission's two specific recommendations - to alleviate the effects of the abuse on the people who suffered and to protect children in care from abuse - would come before the Government by the end of next month. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny told the Dáil the "State itself was responsible for the destruction of life - it was responsible for the destruction of that most precious formative gift which is childhood." "We are as a country haunted by the great famine we wonder at the inhumanity shown to the starving a century and a half ago, we should all be haunted by what Ryan has disclosed because he has revealed a great famine of compassion, a plague of deliberate, relentless cruelty." Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said the report revealed for the first time the full extent of the abuses. He said: "This sordid saga, this systematic abuse and neglect of children who were handed over by the State into the custody of religious institutions shocked Irish society to its core. "This is not something that we can dismiss as something as simply an unfortunate relic of earlier decades."
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