The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, last night launched an attack on what he termed the culture of "human rights speak" in a strong defence of the Government's power to make economic and social policy, writes Arthur Beesley, Political Reporter.
Mr McDowell said the failed policies of socialism in the last century were being repackaged in demands for a rights-based society. He argued against attempts to enshrine fundamental economic rights in the Constitution and said the real substance of social justice was not delivered by a charter but by Government policy.
"I firmly believe that it is for the legislature to decide whether minimum guaranteed standards of social and economic justice should be established in law."
Addressing the Institute of Management Consultants, Mr McDowell said he believed personal responsibility was something that had been surrendered to a world view that implied the individual was always owed a duty by someone else.
"I see in this development grave consequences for our society. Because inherent in such a societal make-up is, in my view, an absence of initiative and enterprise, a diminution of the 'can-do' self-reliant spirit, that is characterised by persons taking responsibility, rather than expecting there is something owed them."
Mr McDowell added: "Civil and political rights form a corpus of rights that are undoubtedly suitable for protection in a system based on adversarial trial before an independent arbitral judiciary which is the cornerstone of the Common Law state. The same cannot be said of economic rights."
Arguing that the State's economic recovery since the 1980s had delivered social justice through the policies of governments, he said social justice was not to be found on the leaves of some statute or textbook.
"I do not believe that to categorise issues of social and economic entitlement as essentially political is to subordinate the character or importance of the issues to those which are decided by the courts on the basis of a fundamental Bill of Rights.
"To distinguish between the two categories or to provide different processes of vindication is not to make one inferior to the other."
He went on: "In recent times this is in an issue that has penetrated discourse at all levels in relation to the interface between the State and individual, though it is never presented in stark terms.