2. Rights and Responsibilities in Communication with Others

Freedom of Expression, the UNCRC, and Irish Constitutional Law

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ratified by Ireland in 1992, young people are recognised as active participants in society rather than passive recipients of adult protection. Three interrelated articles establish their fundamental communication rights:

• Article 12: Guarantees children capable of forming views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting them, with those views given due weight in accordance with their age and maturity. Article 12(2) specifically provides the right to be heard in judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child.
• Article 13: Protects freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds across any chosen medium, subject to lawful limitations.
• Article 17: Recognises the important function of the mass media and requires the State to encourage media to provide children with information of social and cultural benefit from a diversity of national and international sources, with particular regard to minority-language children, while encouraging protective guidelines against injurious material.

The Pro-Speech Argument: Mill and Nussbaum

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill defended free expression by arguing that even unpopular or false opinions must be heard. For Mill, silencing an opinion robs society: if the opinion is right, society loses the truth; if it is wrong, society loses the clearer perception of truth produced by its open collision with error. However, Mill qualified this with the harm principle: individual liberty, including speech, may be legitimately restricted by society only to prevent harm to others. Similarly, in her Capabilities Approach (Creating Capabilities, 2011), course theorist Martha Nussbaum includes 'senses, imagination, and thought' as a central capability, expressly noting that experiencing and producing speech and artistic work requires political guarantees of freedom of expression.

Rights Holders, Duty Bearers, and Legal Limits

In human rights theory, rights cannot be separated from reciprocal responsibilities: every right holder is also a duty bearer. While the State is the primary duty bearer bound to protect and fulfil rights, individual citizens are also duty bearers in daily life: you bear a duty to listen to others, refrain from harassment, and verify claims before spreading them.

Freedom of expression is a qualified right, not an absolute right. Absolute rights (such as freedom from torture) can never be limited under any circumstance. Qualified rights may be lawfully and proportionately restricted to protect public order, national security, or the rights and reputations of others. Where do these limits come from?

• Bunreacht na hÉireann, Article 40.6.1.i: Guarantees the right of citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions, but expressly subjects this right to public order and morality. It states that organs of public opinion must not be used to undermine public order, morality, or the authority of the State.
• Article 42A of Bunreacht na hÉireann: Inserted following the 2012 Children's Referendum (Thirty-first Amendment), Article 42A.4.2° provides that in specified legal proceedings concerning child protection or care, the views of the child shall be ascertained and given due weight having regard to their age and maturity. This gives Article 12 principle constitutional force in family law, though the UNCRC as a whole has not been directly incorporated into domestic statute.
• European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Article 10: Protects expression subject to restrictions that are 'prescribed by law' and 'necessary in a democratic society'—the foundation of the proportionality test.
• Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989: Makes it an offence to publish or distribute material intended or likely to stir up hatred on grounds of race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, membership of the Traveller community, or sexual orientation.
• Defamation Act 2009: Allows a person whose reputation is damaged by a false published statement to sue for damages, balanced by legal defences such as truth, honest opinion, and fair and reasonable publication on matters of public interest.
• Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022: Established Coimisiún na Meán, the statutory regulator for broadcasting and online media, empowered to enforce binding online safety codes on digital platforms.

Evaluating Equality of Communication Rights: The Lundy Model and Irish Evidence

A central question at Higher Level is whether communication rights are enjoyed equally by all young people in Ireland. Evaluating this requires moving beyond formal legal texts to inspect lived practice.

To measure whether Article 12 is meaningfully implemented, Irish youth policy relies on Professor Laura Lundy's Lundy Model of Participation, which sets out four sequential, interdependent criteria:

• Space: Young people must be provided with safe, inclusive opportunities to form and express their views.
• Voice: Young people must be facilitated to express their views freely in their preferred medium.
• Audience: The views must actually be heard by the person or body with the institutional power and authority to act on them—not merely collected and filed.
• Influence: The views must be taken seriously and given due weight in decisions, with transparent feedback provided to explain the outcome.

Named Research Evidence and Structures

Ireland has created formal consultative structures:

• Comhairle na nÓg: Local youth councils operating in all 31 local authority areas, from which a Comhairle na nÓg National Executive is drawn.
• Dáil na nÓg: A national youth parliament convened to deliberate on young people's priorities.
• Hub na nÓg: The national centre of excellence established to support government departments and agencies in implementing the Lundy Model.
• Education Act 1998, Section 27: Provides that students in a post-primary school may establish a student council, and the board of management is required to encourage and facilitate its establishment. However, the school is not legally mandated to have one, nor does the Act grant the council binding power over school governance.
• National Strategy on Children and Young People's Participation in Decision-Making (2015–2020): Formally embedded the Lundy Model across government departments.

The Critical Evaluation: Tokenism and Unequal Access

When evaluating these structures, cite specific institutional research:

• Ombudsman for Children's Office (OCO) reports show that school consultations frequently offer Space and Voice while failing at Audience and Influence. Student councils often find their remits confined to peripheral matters like locker allocation or uniform colours, while core policies on discipline, bullying, or curriculum remain strictly adult-controlled.
• UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding Observations on Ireland: Repeatedly notes that participation structures remain unequal. Confident, settled, high-achieving students are heavily over-represented.
• Growing Up in Ireland: National longitudinal data shows significant disparities in civic engagement, internet access, and educational confidence linked to socio-economic background.
• Marginalised cohorts: Traveller and Roma youth, young people in direct provision, children in state care, and neurodivergent young people needing specialized communication supports face persistent communicative exclusion under both Article 12 and Article 17.

Group Communication, Safe Spaces, and Theoretical Perspectives

If discussion becomes a contest to be heard, the loudest voices win and the group loses both information and the consent of its quieter members. Productive democratic deliberation in small groups requires deliberate practice across core skills:

1. Making points clearly and succinctly to respect collective time.
2. Listening carefully without planning rebuttals while others are speaking.
3. Developing empathy and perspective-taking to understand why an issue matters to someone else.
4. Expressing emotion appropriately by channelling passion constructively.
5. Helping others feel included by rotating roles and drawing in hesitant speakers.
6. Motivating the group to persist when tasks stall.
7. Celebrating collective milestones to build solidarity.

Creating a Safe Environment: Ground Rules and 'I' Statements

Because Politics and Society discussions touch on contentious personal topics such as gender, equality, migration, and religion, small groups must establish safety protocols at the outset:

• Agreed ground rules: Agree boundaries before debate starts. Members decide for themselves how much personal information to share; confidentiality is maintained within the group; and members pledge to challenge arguments, never people.
• 'I' statements: To express strong emotion constructively without provoking defensiveness, members describe behaviour, state their own reaction, and request what is needed. For example, instead of an accusatory attack ('You are completely domineering and ignoring everyone'), a constructive 'I' statement reframes the issue: 'I feel interrupted when you cut across my point, and I would like two minutes to finish explaining my idea.' This directly operationalises the skill of separating relational friction from substantive discussion.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deliberation

• Paulo Freire argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) that genuine dialogue is an egalitarian encounter where individuals reflect together on their social reality to transform it. Dialogue breaks down the authoritarian 'banking model' of education, cultivating critical consciousness (conscientização).
• Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities, 2011) highlights two core capabilities practiced in small-group deliberation: affiliation (being able to live with others, show empathy, and engage in social interaction) and practical reason (being able to form a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection about planning one's life).
• John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) maintained that political authority is legitimate only when established through voluntary consent and mutual agreement, demonstrating that collaborative small-group consensus mirrors the foundation of constitutional government.

Conflict Resolution, Decision Rules, and Cognitive Biases

Disagreement is an inevitable and healthy feature of political life. Negotiation is not about forcing artificial harmony; it is about resolving conflicting interests fairly without damaging relationships.

Positions Versus Interests

A common reason negotiations collapse is that parties fight over positions (inflexible, outward demands) rather than exploring underlying interests (the practical needs driving those demands). When two student council members clash over who gets the final assembly slot, their positions are incompatible. But if their interests are 'I need to launch my survey before Friday' and 'I need to announce the sports results', both can be accommodated by splitting the time or setting up an email bulletin. Identifying interests converts zero-sum, win–lose clashes into win–win solutions.

Decision-Making Rules: Consensus Versus Majority Voting

• Consensus: The group continues negotiating until every member can accept the decision. Its great strength is high legitimacy and voluntary compliance; its weakness is that it is slow, and a single holdout can paralyze the group.
• Majority vote: Quick, decisive, and gives equal mathematical weight to each vote. Its weakness is that it produces an alienated minority whose cooperation may still be required to execute the plan.
• Cross-community consent: The model used in divided societies (such as the Northern Ireland Assembly under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement), requiring support from both traditions rather than a simple 50% + 1 majority.

Practical Negotiation Tools in Action: A School Scenario

Consider a student council with a €600 fundraising surplus. Half the council wants to buy a filtered water fountain; the other half demands an external mental health speaker.

1. Separate people from the problem: Stop accusations of selfishness; focus on the allocation of €600.
2. Identify common ground: Both factions want a visible benefit delivered before the end of the school year.
3. Run a PMI Analysis (Edward de Bono):

• Fountain: Plus (permanent asset, reduces single-use plastic); Minus (costs full €600, requires plumbing approval); Interesting (could the green committee co-fund it?).
• Speaker: Plus (supports student wellbeing during exam term, costs only €250); Minus (one-off event with no lasting physical legacy); Interesting (could the talk be recorded for future classes?).

1. Identify real-world constraints: Board of management approval for plumbing takes six weeks; summer exams begin in five weeks; total budget is capped at €600.
2. Formulate a compromise: Spend €250 on the speaker this term; use the remaining €350 as seed funding for the fountain, requesting matching funds from the Parents' Association in September.
3. Short-term and long-term evaluation: In the short term, evaluate whether the speaker engaged students and the budget remained balanced. In the long term, track whether the Parents' Association contributed and if plastic bottle waste actually declined.
4. Guard against hindsight bias: If the speaker cancels on the morning due to illness, hindsight bias would lead students to claim 'we always knew the speaker was a waste of money'. A fair evaluation assesses the decision based solely on what was known when the choice was made.

Case Study: John Locke and the Good Friday Agreement (1998)

The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement represents a historic application of Lockean consent and conflict resolution:

• Consent: Both governments recognized that Northern Ireland's constitutional status could change only with the consent of a majority of its people.
• Three Strands: Addressed internal Northern Ireland governance (Strand 1), North–South cooperation via the North–South Ministerial Council (Strand 2), and British–Irish relations via the British–Irish Council (Strand 3).
• Compromise and Dual Referendums: Parity of esteem was established for British and Irish identities, and power-sharing was endorsed by simultaneous referendums North and South in May 1998.
• Long-Term Evaluation: While the Agreement ended large-scale political violence, evaluating it over the long term shows fragility: the Northern Ireland Executive has been suspended and collapsed multiple times over political disputes, demonstrating that institutional design requires sustained trust to endure.

Critical Media Literacy, Information Credibility, and Disinformation

A vibrant democracy relies on a free press acting as the fourth estate—an independent watchdog scrutinising executive, legislative, and judicial power. The press informs voters, provides a public forum for competing arguments, and prevents unchecked concentration of authority.

Media Accountability in Ireland

• Press Council of Ireland and the Press Ombudsman: Independent bodies resolving complaints about print and online publications under a professional Code of Practice covering truth, fairness, and privacy.
• Coimisiún na Meán: Regulates television, radio, and online safety under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022.
• Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index: The primary international metric assessing journalistic independence and media plurality worldwide.

Distinguishing Key Concepts

Citizens must distinguish between categories of statements and types of inaccurate content:

• Misinformation: Inaccurate or false information shared without harmful intent (e.g. someone forwarding a false weather warning genuinely believing it to be true).
• Disinformation: False information deliberately created and spread to deceive, manipulate, or cause harm.
• Echo chamber / filter bubble: An online environment where recommendation algorithms and self-selected networks display only content reinforcing existing beliefs, insulating users from counter-evidence and entrenching confirmation bias.

The Source Credibility Test and Argument Analysis

When interrogating any information source, test three elements:

• Authorship: Who produced the material? What are their qualifications, institutional affiliations, and track record?
• Currency: When was the text published or updated? Outdated data applied to contemporary problems produces distorted conclusions.
• Potential Bias: Does the publisher hold financial, commercial, or partisan interests that dictate how facts are framed?

Deconstruct arguments into assumptions (unstated premises accepted without proof), reasons (evidence and logical rationale), counter-arguments (opposing views acknowledged and rebutted), and conclusions (the central claim established).

Emotion and Logic in Persuasion

Be alert to emotive language—loaded terms ('catastrophe', 'treason', 'fanatics') designed to bypass critical scrutiny by triggering immediate outrage or fear. However, look also at the emotional shape of an argument:

• Personal testimony: A single powerful human story can evoke intense empathy that overshadows large-scale statistical evidence.
• Images: Visuals of human distress can rapidly alter public opinion.
• Threat framing: Mobilising anxiety about community security or economic collapse.

Emotion is not inherently manipulative: lived experience is legitimate evidence of impact, and empathy is essential to moral reasoning. The test is whether emotion is used alongside verifiable data or instead of it. If an argument collapses once emotive framing is stripped away, it is persuasion, not sound reasoning.

The Media as an Elite Filter: Herman and Chomsky

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that media in market democracies do not need direct government censorship to narrow public debate. Their propaganda model posits five structural filters: concentrated corporate ownership, dependence on advertising revenue, over-reliance on official sources, 'flak' from organised pressure groups, and dominant ideological consensus. While contested by scholars who cite investigative journalism exposing corporate and state wrongdoing, the model reminds active citizens to interrogate who owns and funds news platforms.

Questioning, Responding, and Scaling Democratic Practices

Gathering reliable data for research—including your Citizenship Project Report—requires direct engagement with people as well as texts.

Choosing Who to Ask and How to Question

• Choosing sources: Match the research question to appropriate people. Expertise (an NGO researcher, an academic, an ombudsman) gives you reliable macro-level data and legal frameworks; lived experience (a service user, a resident, an affected worker) reveals how policies operate on the ground. Distinguish primary sources (data you collect directly through interviews or surveys) from secondary sources (published reports, CSO statistics).
• Questioning strategies:
• Closed question: Fixed response, ideal for counting data: 'Do you use public transport daily? Yes/No.'
• Open question: Invites detailed reflection: 'What are the main obstacles you experience when accessing local youth services?'
• Probing question: Digs deeper into an initial statement: 'You mentioned delays—can you describe how that affected your schedule?'
• Leading question: Biases the respondent towards a predetermined answer and should always be avoided: 'Don't you agree the bus service is completely useless?'
• Responding strategies:
• Paraphrasing: Checking understanding ('So your main priority is route frequency rather than ticket prices?').
• Summarising: Synthesising multiple points at the end of an interview.
• Acknowledging emotion: Validating frustration or concern without abandoning neutrality.

Turning the Criteria on Yourself

The standards applied to professional journalists apply directly to your own writing and speaking, especially in Section C of your Citizenship Project Report:

• Have I distinguished verifiable facts from my own opinions and reasoned judgements?
• Have I cited authors and checked the currency of my secondary data?
• Have I stated the strongest counter-argument honestly and answered it with evidence?
• Have I relied on emotive assertion where objective evidence was required?

Scaling Democratic Practices from Local to Global

Small-group communication practices provide the essential foundation for participating in wider democratic life across four distinct levels:

At the European level, the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) allows citizens to call on the European Commission to propose legislation: if organisers collect one million verified signatures across at least seven EU member states within 12 months, the Commission must meet the organisers and publish a formal response, though it is not obliged to bring forward a law. The Conference on the Future of Europe (2021–2022) adapted small-group deliberative methods by bringing randomly selected transnational citizens' panels together to formulate policy recommendations for EU institutions.

Structural Hurdles to Scaling Up

Deliberative democracy cannot simply be copied and pasted from a classroom into mass society. Three major obstacles intervene:

1. Power imbalances: Organised, well-financed interest groups exercise disproportionate influence over policy. In Ireland, the Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015 established a public register of lobbying to bring transparency to corporate access to public officials.
2. Unequal resources: Participating in public life costs time, money, and transport. Low-income citizens, carers, and marginalised groups facing digital poverty cannot participate on equal terms with professional elites.
3. Scale and complexity: Modern crises (like climate change or systemic banking regulation) involve millions of citizens and vast technical data. Face-to-face deliberation cannot include an entire population; representative voting and advisory deliberative bodies (like Ireland's Citizens' Assemblies) are required to balance expert evidence with public values.

Key terms

UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child)

An international human rights treaty adopted in 1989 (ratified by Ireland in 1992) recognizing children under 18 as rights holders with distinct civil, political, economic, and social rights.

Right Holder

An individual entitled to claim and exercise fundamental human rights and protections under domestic and international law.

Duty Bearer

An individual or institution obligated to respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of others. The State is the primary duty bearer, but individual citizens also bear duties to respect others' rights in communication.

Qualified Right

A right (such as freedom of expression or assembly) that may be lawfully and proportionately restricted by the state to protect public order, national security, or the fundamental rights and reputations of others.

Absolute Right

A non-derogable human right (such as freedom from torture or freedom from slavery) that can never be restricted or suspended by the state under any circumstance.

Article 42A of Bunreacht na hÉireann

The constitutional provision inserted in 2012 affirming children's rights and requiring that the child's views be ascertained and given due weight in specified child protection and care proceedings.

Lundy Model of Participation

Professor Laura Lundy's rights-based framework operationalising UNCRC Article 12 through four interdependent criteria: Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence.

Dialogue (Freire)

An egalitarian, mutual exchange between equals that reflects upon concrete reality to transform it, building critical consciousness (conscientização) rather than imposing one-way instruction.

Affiliation (Nussbaum)

In Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach, the core human capability to live with others, show empathy and compassion, and engage in meaningful social and political interaction.

Practical Reason (Nussbaum)

The capability to form a conception of the good, critically evaluate choices, and engage in reflective practical decision-making about one's life and society.

PMI Analysis

Edward de Bono's lateral thinking tool that structures decision-making by systematically examining an option's Plus (positives), Minus (negatives), and Interesting (exploratory) aspects.

Hindsight Bias

The cognitive inclination to view past events as having been predictable before they happened, leading to unfair assessments of decisions made under uncertainty.

Propaganda Model

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's thesis that mass media systematically filter news through five structural constraints (ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology) to serve elite interests.

Fourth Estate

The societal role of an independent free press acting as a watchdog that scrutinises the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

Misinformation vs Disinformation

Misinformation is false information shared without malicious intent; disinformation is false information manufactured and distributed deliberately to deceive or cause harm.

Echo Chamber

A media or digital environment where algorithmic curation and self-selection insulate users from alternative viewpoints, reinforcing confirmation bias.

European Citizens' Initiative (ECI)

A formal EU participatory democracy instrument allowing citizens to call on the European Commission to propose legislation by gathering at least 1 million verified signatures from at least 7 member states.

Deliberative Democracy

A democratic model where political decisions are legitimized through inclusive, well-informed, and reasoned public debate, rather than through simple power struggles or bare voting.