Seen and Heard: Catherine McGuinness on the Ombudsman for Children's Office

Former Supreme Court Judge, Catherine McGuinness shares her opinion on the Ombudsman for Children's Office with Louise Denvir, and tells her what she thinks have been its key successes.

See more from Catherine Mc Guinness talking about children's rights on our It's Your Right Vimeo Channel:

https://vimeo.com/94941340

Visit the It's Your Right website for more information on children's rights and the It's Your Right campaign: http://itsyourright.ie/

Transcript below

It’s Your Right

00:00 (Crowd noise.)

Catherine McGuinness: I’m Catherine McGuinness. I’m a former judge of the Supreme Court and I’m involved in a lot of different activities, now that I’m retired, and in one of my aspects I’m very interested in the welfare of children and the rights of children and as such I’ve been very much in contact with the Children’s Ombudsman, Emily Logan, over the last ten years.

Interviewer: And it’s the 10th anniversary today of the Office of the Children’s Ombudsman, what are your views on the past ten years?

Catherine McGuinness: I think that the Ombudsman has made a huge difference to the whole public attitude to the rights of children and the way in which we look at children and the way in which we listen to the voice of children. Particularly because she doesn’t just talk about children. She actually has the children therewith her talking to her and talking to us through her. Her whole approach in looking at the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and seeing how Ireland can fulfill the rights that are included in that Convention has been a whole mind change in this country over the past ten years

Interviewer: What do you think are the key successes of the office over the past ten years?

Catherine McGuinness: I would say, the very fact that she has brought children out of the dark, as it were, that when we look back at things like the Ryan Report where we see that children were kind of shifted from place to place, they were either under the tutelage of their parents or the State have been, in some cases, ill-treated, but, if they weren’t ill-treated they were under the radar, as it were. That, she has brought them out from that and of course, just the very fact that majority of Irish people voted in favour of this Children’s Rights Referendum is in many ways a tribute to what Emily has done.

02:02 (Crowd noise.)

Fade out.