Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese is to give the annual Edmund Burke Lecture in Trinity this year, titled “The Future of Ireland: Human Rights and Children’s Rights”.
The Edmund Burke Lecture, which takes place this year on November 5th, is a free public lecture hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
A post on the Long Room Hub web page said that McAleese’s lecture will explore “how we define and vindicate a child’s right to religious freedom, conscience, opinion and belief as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to which Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Holy See are all State Parties”.
Earlier this year, it was reported that McAleese is likely to be nominated to succeed Mary Robinson as Chancellor of the University of Dublin, of which Trinity is the sole constituent.
Robinson’s term ended in June, and it is expected that her successor will be appointed before Christmas.
Speaking to the Irish Times, Senator Ivana Bacik has said that McAleese would be a “superb candidate for Chancellor”.
Previous people who have delivered the lecture have included Paul Muldoon, Professor Roy Foster and Baroness Onora O’Neill.
The post continued: “Ireland’s future sets before us a series of questions about constitutional and Church–State relationships. The vast majority of current Church members (around 84 percent worldwide and considerably higher in Ireland) were baptized as babies.”
“For the Catholic majority in Ireland this has resulted in the imposition of onerous obligations on children long before they are equipped to evaluate them or agree to them. However, a more fundamental issue still lies unresolved and that is always allowing the right of parents to present their child for Baptism and raise the child in their faith, whether the child can, in international human rights law, be held to denominational membership and obligations entered when he or she was non sui compos.”
“This has special significance for Ireland given the dominant position of the Catholic Church, particularly in education and healthcare in Ireland but the general issues addressed have transferable implications for other denominations and faith systems”, the post said.
McAleese was appointed Trinity’s Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology in 1975, succeeding Mary Robinson. While at Trinity she became involved in the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform as a legal advisor.
She was elected President of Ireland in 1997. Since 2018 she has been Professor of Children, Law and Religion at the University of Glasgow.
