IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
BY SARAH MACDONALD – 07 FEBRUARY 2015
Former Irish President Mary McAleese has questioned Pope Francis’s comments on smacking children, warning it could signal a turning back of the clock in the church’s attitude to corporal punishment and children’s rights.
The former Ardoyne resident who was a professor of law at Trinity is currently completing a doctorate in canon law.
She highlights that the Vatican is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It advocates the universal abolition of corporal punishment of children in all circumstances.
The mother-of-three refers to an exchange last year between the Holy See and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child which claimed corporal punishment “remains widespread in some Catholic institutions” and “reached endemic levels” in Ireland as revealed by the Ryan Report.
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