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By Lorna Gold. Academics, policymakers and NGOs met in early April at the Royal Irish Academy to examine how Ireland’s new foreign policy, ‘Global Island’, can be put into practice. The striking thing about this policy is an extraordinary clash between the two key sections: that on ‘Our Values’ which establishes a framework of values for foreign policy, and that on ‘Our Prosperity’ which focuses on policy in relation to economic growth, investment, trade and exports. The two sections might well have been written by different people. The themes of inequality, poverty and climate change figure prominently in the contextual analysis. The values expressed in the first half of the policy are ones which any human-rights advocate would welcome, particularly against an international backdrop where human rights are increasingly under attack. Ireland remains committed to core values of fairness, justice, security and sustainability. It commits to standing up for human rights, civil society space, and promoting greater gender equality. The long commitment to multilateralism, particularly to the UN, is re-stated, as is the intention to stand for the UN Security Council for 2021-22. The signature policy of poverty-focused overseas aid is outlined. Reference is made to the Government’s commitment to the UN target of giving 0.7% of Gross National Income in overseas aid. Unfortunately, no time-frame for achieving this forty-year-old target is included and progress is once again linked to economic improvement. While the re-statement of values is important, a chasm divides it and the main thrust of the document, which relates to economic growth, investment, trade and exports – as if these somehow stand outside the elaborated framework of values. The entire focus of the second part of the policy is on how invigorated economic diplomacy, including enhanced marketing of our national day, can generate prosperity for Ireland. There is a complete absence of any reference to values and to the need for policy coherence if we are to address the fact that much of our prosperity is still built on the backs of the poor and of the planet. The policy refers to more integrated and skilled economic diplomacy, for example, but has no mention of human rights or of the importance of not compromising principles outlined in the ‘our values’ section in the quest for greater trade and investment. Three issues come into particularly sharp relief. How does Ireland’s corporation tax regime square with our fairness values? How do our expansionist agricultural policies around beef and dairy square with our sustainability values? How do our trade missions square with our long-standing commitment to engage on human-rights issues? The failure of the values framework to inform the chapter on the removal of trade barriers is particularly concerning given the increasing influence of transnational finance over international governance structures. The reference to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is worrying. It is pitched simply as a positive development, with no reference to the serious concerns, expressed by civil society in particular, about the inclusion of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism, and the implications of this for human rights and for climate-change mitigation. There is perhaps an implicit acceptance within Government of the views expressed by Minister Richard Bruton in an Irish Times article (23rd January 2014) that trade missions are not the place to raise human rights, that we do human rights in certain multilateral fora such as the UN Human Rights Council, but that bilateral trade missions, even with unsavoury regimes, are not the place to argue about human rights. In other words, Irish jobs trump every other concern and value. The values at the core of this policy are the right ones. However, the litmus test of values is how they are integrated across policy and applied in the tough choices between policies. There needs to be clear accountability mechanisms to assess that process. There are two glimmers of hope for policy coherence. The first is a cross-departmental committee on human rights. This committee has met once. How its agenda is shaped and acted on remains to be seen. The second is the consultation on a National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights. Hopefully these two initiatives will promote the values framework. • Lorna Gold is Head of Policy and Advocacy with Trócaire

By Niall Crowley. Political and media outrage is strangely hard to direct and seemingly impossible to sustain. There was a lot of it about, though, when ‘Prime Time’ did its exposé of Aras Attracta in Mayo and the inhumane treatment of people with intellectual disabilities there. The Taoiseach led the way with: ‘This was frightening, sickening, infuriating…people legitimately asked question how could this happen in 2014 with trained nurses, healthcare workers” and “…it was not an example of care; it was an example of control over fragile, vulnerable, voiceless people”. The outrage had already waned when, only a few days later, HIQA inspectors found that residents in the Redwood Extended Care Facility in Meath did not have freedom to exercise choice and control in their daily lives. They reported a high level of restrictive practice and restraint used in the centre, including locked doors and residents confined to specific rooms, sometimes for significant periods of time. Physical restraints included the enforced removal of residents to designated areas of the centre, and a number of staff physically holding residents in a position, sometimes for long periods. No doubt there will be some resurgence of outrage when the numerous investigations into these facilities finally conclude. The outrage, however, was not only temporary. It was also misdirected. All the debate was about staff – the need to punish them; about administrators and the need for them to resign; about getting surveillance and CCTV cameras in all locations; putting in place advocacy and independent confidential recipients. No politicians or journalists, in their outrage, made reference to Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of all Persons with Disabilities. Article 19 is inconvenient. It commits States to recognise the “equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others”. It gets even more inconvenient: States are required to take steps to ensure people with disabilities “have the opportunity to choose their place of residence and where and with whom they live on an equal basis with others and are not obliged to live in a particular living arrangement” and to ensure they “have access to a range of in‐home, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to support living and inclusion in the community, and to prevent isolation or segregation from the community”. It is not surprising that deinstitutionalisation didn’t get a mention, given the almost complete lack of progress on this. The HSE currently has a target of moving 150 people with disabilities each year from what are called congregated settings. Even this minimal target is not being met, with only some 100 people with disabilities moved last year. This lack of progress is despite a target set in 2011 to move all people with disabilities from these congregated settings within seven years. At that time there were 4,099 people living in such facilities. Outrage didn’t allow for any analysis of the root causes of what was happening at Aras Attracta or the Redwood facility. Nor are these isolated incidents. The ‘Prime Time’ team analysed 420 HIQA inspection reports on disability services and found that less than 2% of them were compliant with the required standards. Institutionalisation strips people of their human dignity. It enables abuse and inhumane treatment. Dr Andrew Power of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy in NUIG notes that: “Residential institutions worldwide have increasingly been found to create high-risk environments for abuse and neglect”. Useful indignation would have demanded an end to institutional settings for people with intellectual disabilities. It would have explored the lack of deinstitutionalisation as well as the manner in which the very limited deinstitutionalisation is being implemented. Deinstitutionalisation to date has largely involved the transfer of people with intellectual disabilities from institutions into community group homes. Such community settings can merely reproduce institutional cultures and continue to deny choice to people with disabilities. Power’s research found that there is “less personalisation and poorer outcomes for persons in community group homes compared to other family and personalised arrangements”. The failure to promote deinstitutionalisation or to create personally supported settings in communities where people with disabilities are in control of their lives and have choices merits sustained outrage. It is a gross abuse of human rights and its remedy is not even on the agenda. •

By Sorley McCaughey. Tax policy poses options to prioritise one sector of society over another. As with all choices, there are inevitably winners and losers. Professor Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has firmly linked tax policy with human rights. He has posed this challenge squarely in the Irish context. Last month the Central Statistics Office released data showing 135,000 children are living in material deprivation.  Citing these figures, Alston argued that this and other pockets of deep poverty across Ireland are the direct consequence of conscious decisions made by key actors who have chosen to prioritise other goals. He was speaking at a Christian Aid conference on the subject of the human-rights impact of tax and fiscal policy. Christian Aid’s experiences in countries of the global south tell a similar story. Resource-rich but capital-poor Governments offer lucrative tax incentives to companies to locate in their country. This is because they are forced to compete to attract foreign direct investment into their country. Each incentive comes at a cost as money is diverted away from essential social services. In Sierra Leone, for example, the cost of tax incentives in 2011 was eight times that of the health budget. This is happening in a country where half the population lives below the bread line. Invariably whether in Ireland or the global south it is the poorest and the marginalised who experience the worst impacts of such tax policies. Both Alston and his predecessor as special rapporteur, Magdalena Sepulveda, have questioned Ireland’s commitment to these economic and social rights. Alston observed  growing reluctance in Ireland to accept that there are minimum human rights of access to housing, health and food. Sepulveda’s 2011 report highlighted that, as signatories to the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), the Irish state has an obligation to ensure that citizens’ rights are protected even during times of economic hardship. She wrote, “States must devote the maximum available resources to ensure progressive realisation of all economic, social and cultural rights by its population, as expeditiously and effectively as possible”. The tension appears to lie mainly in ideological differences. Cuts to carers allowances for example were deemed a necessary evil by the Government – cuts that should be borne bravely, but that would be temporary in nature and would be readjusted when the books were balanced. A human rights-based approach to tax and fiscal policy could not pursue that course of action, even in times of great economic challenges. Rights are not dispensable, to be traded away during challenging times. Budgeting from a rights perspective obliges a state to prioritise differently, to put the rights of citizens first and to allocate resources accordingly. This is not simply rhetoric. As signatories to the UNCESCR, the Irish we are duty bound as a state to ensure that this happens. Sepulveda linked this to tax policy. She expressed concern “about the low level of taxation in Ireland, lower than most other European countries. Low levels of domestic taxation revenue can be a major obstacle to a State’s ability to meet obligations to realise economic, social and cultural rights”. Last year the Department of Finance launched a public consultation paper on ‘Spillover Analysis – Possible Impacts of Irish tax System on Developing Economies’. This is an encouraging initiative, and suggests a willingness in the Department to be seen to be doing the right thing. Irish tax and fiscal policy should be subject to periodic scrutiny to ensure they conform with the international human rights standards to which Ireland is a party. Inevitably this will raise some difficult questions for the Government. However, until economic and social rights are recognised as inalienable and subject to the same protection as the more traditional civil and political rights, an uncomfortable gap will persist between what we say as a State and what we actually do as evidenced in our crucial tax and fiscal policies. • Sorley McCaughey is Head of Advocacy and Policy with Christian Aid Ireland