Why stop with five constitutional amendments for children? Newton Emersonwants a Proclamation of Independence for Children - or he'll hold his breath until he's sick Newton's Optic
Irish boys and Irish girls: In the name of God and the future generations from which she receives her new tradition of childhood, Ireland, through us, a coalition of 80 liberal pressure groups, summons the image of children being struck to flag up an absolute free-for-all.
Having organised and trained her lobbyists through her secret political organisation, the Children's Rights Alliance, and through her openly political organisation, the Soldiers of Electoral Destiny, having patiently undermined parental discipline, having casually hounded men out of the teaching profession, having resolutely waited for the right moment to propose a referendum, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled supporters in Europe at gallant conferences of legal experts, but relying in the first on her own sentimentality, she throws a tantrum in Superquinn in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the children of Ireland to the secondhand ownership of our social agenda, and to the unwitting remote-control of our policy agenda, no matter how unfeasible.
The long usurpation of that right by people other than us has not extinguished that right, nor can it ever be extinguished, except by briefly humouring us before failing to fund any of our proposals.
Three times during the past six years we have asserted our right to sovereignty via other people's children by waving our arms around.
Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in the face of previous refusals to enforce our legislation, we hereby proclaim that this time the Government had better mean it, and we pledge our lives and your livelihoods to the cause of welfare and the exaltation of taxation.
The children of the Irish Republic are entitled to, and hereby claim, whatever well-meaning wish list emerges from the consultation exercise we shall shortly crawl all over like a hyperactive toddler.
The Republic guarantees everything we want because anything less would be child abuse, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation until the whole nation's happiness and prosperity is gone, patronising all the adults of the nation equally, and oblivious to the cost or the probability of any of this actually happening, carefully calculated by an alien economist from the planet Zarg.
Until our arms have been waved around enough to establish us as a permanent presence in the national Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland, and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, plus the implied suffrage of all her children through certain men and women, the Consultation Process, hereby constituted, will require the trust of the people to administer its own affairs.
We place the cause of the children of the Irish Republic under the protection of the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
We pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by mentioning that after our ambassador signed the declaration, he dropped it down the back of a radiator and went to lunch.
In this supreme irony, the Irish nation must, by its dishonesty and hypocrisy and by its readiness to sacrifice common sense in the presence of children, prove itself worthy of never growing up.