Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, has contended that the Church is undermining the rights of the child by assuming that infant baptism implies membership of the Church. She is, admittedly, not to blame for the headline on the edited version of her text in The Irish Times which read: “Baptism denies babies their human rights”, but it is not far from the substance of her talk at University College Cork recently. In it, she says that “throughout the world, there continues a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion… [The Church] restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See, which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law, are State Parties”.