Madam, - Last week, your paper gave wide coverage to the attendance of a variety of groups which made oral presentations to the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution on the Definition of the Family as presented in the Irish Constitution.
Although our presentation on Friday lasted over half-an-hour, we got six lines in your edition of last Saturday; we feel this does not adequately reflect the content of our submission.
Firstly, we called for the adoption of the UN definition of the family, which is an all-embracing, non-exclusive definition that recognises all family forms. This was unanimously adopted by the United Nations when discussing the role of the family in 1999, and when presented to the National Women's Council of Ireland at its EGM in 2004, it gained the support of a great majority of the organisations present.
In reply to a series of questions put to us by members of the Committee we made the following points, among others:
The recognition of women's role within the home as defined in Article 41.2 is patriarchal, sexist, outdated and at odds with the EU legislation.
The caring role itself should have constitutional recognition in view of the fact that both men and women are capable of acting as carers and do so in reality.
On the question of the rights of natural fathers, we did call for enhanced rights for fathers saying a natural father should "in equity" have automatic right to guardianship of his child. We also stated that the right of guardianship should be capable of being rescinded if a father refused to be actively involved in caring for his child and did not contribute this fair share financially to his child's upbringing.
The child should be given recognition as a person with rights in the Constitution.
As an organisation, AIM Family Services realises there is a lot of repetition at these oral hearings as each group responds to the same question. However, in the interest of reflecting AIM's position on these issues, we feel it is important that our remarks to the committee are recorded. - Yours, etc.,
DEIRDRE McDEVITT, Chair, AIM Family Services, D'Olier Street, Dublin 2.