Sir, – Catherine Mc Guinness makes two inaccurate statements (Opinion, October 9th).

First, her assertion that there is no concerted No campaign, is untrue. Already, there are grassroots efforts by ordinary citizens, many of them parents, to bring to the public the many reasons to vote No to this amendment.

Second, she states that the objections to this amendment concern the dilution of parental or family rights. This is not the case. From the outset, Parents for Children, has consistently argued that this amendment, like previous wordings, will remove from children the right to parental protection and advocacy. If passed, this amendment will make the State alone the supreme decider of children’s rights And when the State fails children, as it inevitably will, there is no provision for a parent or other relative to vindicate the rights of the child.

Could supporters of this amendment please tell parents why we should trust the State with our children’s rights? – Yours, etc,

Sir, – I was expecting to see something in the referendum wording about the rights of the adopted adult child to know his/her origins; about opening the files held by, mostly, religious orders. But the Minister didn’t have the guts to do that, or was warned off.

Unlike Grainne Mason (October 4th) who writes that she is a State secret, and she’s tired of it, I’m only half a State secret. I’m 50 per cent traceable only because I was given a name – if I was registered as “female”, as many were, I doubt that I’d have met my mother’s family. So Ms Mason is 100 per cent untraceable. Yet I can go into a supermarket and pick up a piece of beef and read that it is 100 per cent treaceable, a dead animal! I can see a picture of the farmer on the cover and I can read his address. Even vegetables are 100 per cent treaceable. Now pork is to be DNA-tested to ensure it’s Irish.

In Scotland since 1930 (82 years ago) and in England and Wales since 1975 (37 years ago) adopted people over 18 have been allowed to see their files. But here, I know that adoption details cannot be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Here’s what they did in East Germany with the Stasi files: Between 1991 and 2011, about 2.75 million individuals, mostly GDR citizens, requested to see their own files. The ruling also gave people the ability to make duplicates of their documents.

Grow up Ireland, grow up the Catholic Church, grow up Ministers and Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald. Have they no imagination? With all this talk of the Gathering and ancestry, shouldn’t we all be able to do our family tree? Shouldn’t humans as well as cattle, pigs and vegetables be 100 per cent traceable? – Yours, etc,

Sir, – I wish to respond to Vincent Browne’s assertion (Opinion, October 3rd) that the constitutional amendment on children’s rights “offers feeble protection for children from abuse and neglect and nothing at all about cherishing the children of the nation equally”. In order to support his argument, Browne cites the 1916 Proclamation, while ignoring the much more substantive 1919 Democratic Programme.

In reality both these statements of national aspiration are essentially rhetorical appeals to the public.

The real forum for children’s rights is in policy, not politics. The Mundella Report (1896) had recommended the deinstitutionalisation of children in care and the use of foster homes as a policy of normalising children’s lives in the community. The Children Act 1908 (popularly known as the “Children’s Charter”) sought to enshrine children’s rights in law.

These policy developments were effectively ignored in Ireland, where the new state adopted a more traditionalist policy towards children, based on the principle of subsidiarity. This meant that the family, the churches and the voluntary sector became responsible for child care and protection. Children are virtually invisible in the 1937 Constitution. They were relegated to the position of minor citizens in the new state – insofar as they had any citizenship at all!

Civil society did not entirely acquiesce in this state of affairs. This public concern resulted in the Cussen Report (1936), which nonetheless exonerated the reformatory and industrial school system. During the 1950s and 1960s the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (JCWSSW) continued the campaign for reform of the system.

However, it was not until Ireland became an accession state, seeking membership of the European Union, that our human rights record in relation to children became a public issue. There followed the OECD Report (1966) and the Kennedy Report (1970). The result was the gradual closure of the reformatory and industrial schools system and its replacement by a community-based children’s service, underpinned by the Child Care Act 1991. It took another four decades to tell the truth. In 2009 the Ryan Report exposed the human rights tragedy of our institutional child protection system, managed by the Catholic Church.

While the Children Act 1991 is an important milestone, it has not been possible to offer an effective child protection service because of lack of children’s rights in the 1937 Constitution, as is clearly evident in the 2010 Roscommon Report. The Baby Ann case (2006), as Browne fully concedes, adds further urgent evidence to the case for the children’s rights amendment, so that adoptive parents can have watertight security.

Browne is right to argue that there needs to be more redistributive justice in favour of children. The problem with his argument is that can’t happen until children are fully recognised as citizens.

The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (to which Ireland is a signatory) sets out the international standard for children’s rights.

Its philosophy rests on the three Ps: provision, protection and participation. The constitutional amendment sets out to enshrine these principles in our social system. It is essentially an emancipatory proposal that seeks to provide children with meaningful citizenship in Ireland. It merits the support of every adult citizen as a substantive human rights initiative and genuine means of redressing past wrongs through inserting children’s rights into the Constitution. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Shortly before he died, Dr Garret FitzGerald argued that competent economists should be employed by the Department of Finance to bring the required expertise to bear on the array complex economic problems facing this country.

In your own pages every Tuesday (Business) you publish articles by one such prize-winning economic expert, Prof Paul Krugman. On several occasions recently Krugman has argued that it makes no economic sense to respond to economic depressions with a raft of austerity measures.Looking back over the history of depressions, Krugman argues that, though austerity has often been the response, that policy has rarely worked – rather has it tended to deepen the depression.

The key reasoning in his position can be summed up as follows: in depressions, for a variety of reasons, consumers don’t spend and this further reduces economic activity. If the response is austerity then spending is further reduced as is economic activity in general so deepening the recession.

In his recent book End This Depression Now, Krugman laments that the movers and shakers in our economies have failed to take note of the findings of economists on this issue and he comments: “too many people who matter . . . have for a variety of reasons, chosen to forget the lessons of history and the conclusions of several generations’ worth of economic analysis, replacing that hard-won knowledge with ideologically and politically convenient prejudices”.

Maybe we can’t afford to hire economists for the Department of Finance now, but is it not time our Government began to take notice of expert opinion publicly available on this matter and to alter the policy of austerity before it is too late? Surely we can afford to make a few copies of Prof Krugman’s book available to the Minister and those working for him – or, at the very least – encourage them to read Prof Krugman’s pieces in your pages! – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Your Editorial (October 9th) misses the point. The IFSC Clearing House Group spends most of its time monitoring international developments and especially the technical legislative changes necessary to compete against the many competitive alternative jurisdictions. It is an effective structure and the suggestion that we should moderate its influence flies in the face of Ireland competing internationally.

The answer is not to reduce the input from the IFSC Clearing House Group but rather to create similar structures for our other businesses that compete internationally. It is a salutary fact that while our domestic banking sector has been such an unmitigated disaster with few exceptions, the IFSC has been one of the greatest enterprises Ireland has ever created.

As someone who has retired, I had the privilege to work in the sector for the past 20 years. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Brendan Quinn (October 10th) is wrong to imply that stopping child benefit payments to parents for children resident elsewhere in the EU will make any tangible difference to Ireland’s fiscal situation. Such payments amounted to €15.4 million in 2010 (Irish Times, June 20th, 2011), and so comprise less than 1 per cent of the approximate €2 billion annual cost of this welfare payment.

The real problem with child benefit is that it is an unfortunate holdover from the Fianna Fáil era of vote-buying profligacy; we couldn’t afford such generous benefits then, and we can’t afford them now. For a three-child family, monthly child benefit in Ireland is €428 compared to the equivalent of €255 in the UK. Cut it, or means-test it – preferably both – but the current approach is not sustainable. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Ivor Shorts (October 9th) criticises Trócaire for singling out Israel for “criticism and action”. Any cursory look at its work would reveal that the organisation singles out many governments around the world for criticism and action. Perhaps it is Mr Shorts who has singled out Israel as immune to such campaigns.

Mr Shorts rightly states that Israeli children traumatised by the conflict deserve every kind of help that is available. However the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in comparison with Israel, may have something to with their greater emphasis on Palestine. I applaud Trócaire’s principled stance in favour of a just resolution to this conflict. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Every year around this time, after the Ploughing Championships and the harvest, the farmers take over the centre of Dublin for a day.

Why don’t they have the Ploughing Championships in the Phoenix Park and extend them to take in the day out in Merrion Square? – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Jerry Carroll, director of the Bar Council, writes of the importance that the debate on legal reforms is informed by facts and data that are inclusive and accurate (October 8th). I very much agree with this sentiment and in that spirit I would like to clarify a number of issues.

The data to which Mr Carroll refers is taken from the Services Producer Price Index published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). It is not, as Mr Carroll suggested, taken from a Forfás survey and the survey was not carried out on behalf of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC).

The data on which the index is based refers to charges to business customers by solicitors and does not include charges to Government or private consumers or barristers’ charges. As the statutory national statistics office, the CSO strives for the best statistical standards and methodology, and adheres to the highest professional standards of impartiality, integrity and independence.

In using the CSO data on legal service costs, Forfás and the NCC always highlight the experimental nature of the Services Producer Price Index, the limitations of the data and the relatively small number of solicitor firms who responded. We do not, however, rely on a single source when addressing the issue of legal costs.

The World Bank’s Doing Business 2012 report, for example (referenced in the NCC benchmarking report Ireland’s Competitiveness Scorecard) finds that legal costs in Ireland are amongst the highest of the countries considered.

Mr Carroll’s commitment on behalf of the Bar Council to fully engage with the Government and others, to ensure that the process of legal reform ensures the fairest and most effective delivery legal services to the public, is, of course, very welcome.

In that regard an increased response rate from legal firms and professionals, facilitated perhaps by their professional bodies, would be a most welcome and constructive contribution. – Yours, etc,

A chara, – Monday night last week my son was rushed to Limerick Regional AE, arriving there at 10.45pm. He was seriously ill, having collapsed in his home. He has MS and is severely disabled as a result. What we faced into in AE makes me so ashamed, angry and frustrated. I stood beside his trolley (praise be he was put on a trolley) for over two hours.

It was like being in a totally surreal place – moving his trolley back and forth to allow people to move by him. To watch others looking at what was unfolding was shameful. To see at 2am, a very elderly man struggling with his Zimmer frame as he looked for somewhere to stand – there were no chairs – as his bewildered wife followed him around, this sight will stay with me.

Remember this was Monday night and no sign of anyone who was drunk, drugged or disorderly. I only saw sick people.

How have we come to this, that the most vulnerable in our society are neglected in this way? Not for one second am I criticising the nurses or doctors. How they get up every day to face into this chaos is beyond me.

When my son was eventually seen at 2.30am he was put into a cubicle and there he remained for 24 hours. He eventually got a bed and remained there for one day and then we took him home. He is recovering now and doing well.

Shame, shame, shame on our Government that this chaos continues every day in every hospital in the country.

Why isn’t the Army Medical Corp called in to assist in places where help is badly needed? What else is it doing? Protecting the country some will say. How about protecting the people of the country who so badly need help.

Minister for Health James Reilly needs to wise up and stop trying to run his health portfolio like a business. His attempt to justify the primary care centres in his constituency is galling. How dare he forget that his portfolio is about all the people – particularly people who are ill, disabled and vulnerable. – Is mise,

Sir, – I write to commend Dr Tom Clonan (October 9th) on offering a succinct yet grim glimpse of the future.

We are on course for imminent implosion of our public health system.

Proposed practices will not only drive hospital consultants out of the Irish public system but will also serve to deter State-funded soon-to-be-doctors.

Medical graduates will go away and stay away.

The Minister for Health must re-orientate his position to focus on retaining our complement of domestically-trained doctors and move to empower those who believe reforming our health service is a civic responsibility. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Bernard O’Grady answers Prof de Londras’s criticism of his factual inaccuracies by pointing out that “letters to newspapers represent the opinions of the writer rather than those of the editor.” However true it is to say that The Irish Times does not endorse all opinions contained in its paper, it doesn’t change the fact that myth-making to support your opinions damages the integrity of the debate as a whole.

Printing letters with factual inaccuracies provides balance in the same way as using a motorbike wins you the Tour de France. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – Bernard O’Grady (October 10th) appears to assert that factual inaccuracies in letters to newspapers can be disregarded as they represent the opinion of the writer. Mr O’Grady erroneously stated that same-sex couples can adopt under Irish civil partnership legislation, but it is a legal fact that they cannot. The Irish Statute Books are not opinion, they are fact. Mr O’Grady also states that the campaign for marriage equality is being “pushed by a liberal elite far removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary people”. The thousands upon thousands of people who have taken to the streets for the last four years on the March for Marriage would disagree. I imagine the 73 per cent (Red C poll) of the Irish public who are in favour of marriage equality would also disagree. – Yours, etc,

A chara, – As one who did pay homage to St Colman/Kolomani while cycling through Melk during the summer (An Irishman’s Diary, October 9th), might I suggest (since it’s now too late for a novena before his feast day on October 13th) the daily invocation of both saints Colman and Kilian in an effort to convert Austria and Germany to the true interpretation of the June 29th decision on debt sustainability as it applies to Ireland.

Having done both Irish saints to death it is the least we might expect. – Is mise,