ANNIE DORAN WAS 47-years-old when she filled out the 1911 census. She lived in a tenement slum she shared with nine other families at 24 Gloucester Street, Dublin, just the other side of the Liffey from the Custom House.

Over the course of her life Annie gave birth to eight children; only three survived.

Across the tenements of the inner city the child mortality rate was over 50 per cent.

Twenty-six thousand families lived in one-room dwellings. On Henrietta Street an astonishing 835 people lived in just 15 houses.

I learned all of this from a lecture delivered by President Michael D Higgins last month, remembering the 1913 Lockout, and I started to think about how the poverty and deprivation visible to the men and women who founded our republic drove the writing of what is considered to be one of the two founding texts of our Republic – the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil.

It says, “It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter ….”

It goes on to guarantee the right of every citizen to enough to live a life with dignity and to make it an obligation of the State to guard the health of its people.

Economic and social human rights

The language of the Democratic Programme is of its time, but what it outlines are what today we would understand as economic and social human rights – the right to adequate income, the right to health, to social security, to food.

Of course there is no comparison between the poverty of that time and life in Ireland today. As difficult as the recession has been, as much suffering as it has brought, they are different realities.

But it seems to me that we now face that same challenge to radically re-imagine and rebuild our society and our political and legal systems. We hear so much talk about the need to regain our sovereignty, but sadly very little about what we will do differently when we do so.

Will we simply regain our sovereignty and go back to being the state and society we were, the one that led us to this crisis, or will we instead begin to think about the state we might be: a true republic of equals, built upon the principles imagined by those who gave their lives for the foundation of the modern Irish state?

Ireland before the recession, too, was a deeply unequal society

Successive Irish governments have signed and ratified legally binding international human rights treaties that make it a legal, as well as a moral, obligation on our leader to fulfil the pledges made to the Irish people in 1919. These are laws written and adopted by States.

It’s not enough to aspire to get back to where we were before the economic crisis.

Ireland before the recession was a deeply unequal and divided society. In 2004 almost 20 per cent of people were at risk of poverty. One in four private patients did not attend their GP when sick because they were worried about the cost.

Our country was run by a political and financial elite, accountable to no one, that made decisions which shaped and corrupted our economy and our communities, which saw accountability and transparency as threats to the proper order of things.

At a time when it is commonly understood that a lack of transparent, effective and evidence based decision making, as well as poor systems of administration and oversight, led us to this place of crisis, shouldn’t the overwhelming demand be that we radically change?

For example, should we not be looking at putting obligations on the State to protect our fundamental human rights like health, social security and education, ensuring that the primary responsibility of the State is to serve the common good?

Human rights law is not about enriching barristers

Economic, social and cultural rights are not foreign to our constitutional tradition. We have the education provision in Article 42; we have a particularly well-upheld provision on the right to property. We have the Directive Principles of Social Policy in Article 45.

There are those who argue that we cannot afford these rights, that once written into our Constitution the ‘floodgates’ will open.

But putting the right to housing in the Irish Constitution on Thursday does not mean that on Friday anyone without a house can take the Government to court.

Human rights law is not about enriching a generation of barristers. It is about putting a framework in place that obliges a government to say, ‘These are our priorities, these are the rights we are trying to deliver, and here is how we are going to do the best we can with the money we have available’.

Nor is this an argument for unlimited public spending. It is about setting the priorities for that spending.

Is it on the whim of a minister or because one section of society was able to shout loudest?

And how do we, as taxpayers, ensure accountability in the delivery of these services? We cannot.

Accountability should not be a threat to any government

The reality is that our systems of administration are so flawed that the Government often cannot even account for how it spends our money. Research carried out for Amnesty International Ireland by Indecon, for example, revealed that the HSE is unable to account for how the mental health budget is spent every year.

We can learn from the experience of other States where these rights have been inserted into the constitution or written into the equivalent body of law.

A 2010 German court decision, Hartz IV, showed how this might work. The court was asked to rule on the constitutionality of government legislation setting the level of unemployment and child benefits. The court concluded that provisions of the German constitution, gave rise to a right to a minimum subsistence level to ensure human dignity.

The constitution did not prescribe what that amount was, nor was it for the Court to do so. That’s the job of the elected representatives and I would not argue otherwise.

But it was for the court to examine whether the process of determining the level of benefits was needs-oriented, realistic, transparent and evidence based.

Accountability should not be a threat to any government. Transparency must not be seen as something dangerous. The further we travel down that road the more governing in Ireland becomes a conspiracy of the political class whose role is not to serve the people, but to manage them, not to find ways to meet their needs and expectations, but to denigrate them.

We must prioritise the rights of people living in this country

Successive governments have made their promises to this country. They have promised to fix the health service, improve education standards, get people back to work, ensure everyone has enough to live on.

Put these promises in law. Use them to drive reform.

What would it look like if, in negotiating the options open to the Government, in implementing decisions of the Troika, our Government had had to balance those demands with obligations enshrined in the Constitution to protect fundamental human rights?

Irish governments of whatever political composition, and in whatever economic circumstances we find ourselves, must understand and be bound by a clear obligation to prioritise the rights of people living in this country.

This time we must have the courage and vision to radically change and become the republic they dreamt of.

The republic our people deserve.

Colm O’Gorman is the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland. This article is an abridged version of his address at the MacGill Summer School on Wednesday 31st July 2013.