EDITORIAL - Make honours harder to get; but Daly, O'Connor deserving

As is usually the case this time of the year, the Government is quietly sifting through the names of people who may be eligible for, and deserving of, national honours, in some cases with shameless jostling and lobbying by prospective recipients. They still have cachet.

The honours list will be announced on Independence Day, August 6, and the awards formally bestowed at a ceremony with some pomp, and usually in steaming mid-morning heat, by the governor general on National Heroes Day in October at the grounds of his residence, King's House.

Despite their continued prestige, this newspaper believes, and has several times made the point that the annual honours list has grown too long and that the process for determining the honourees is not, it seems to us, sufficiently rigorous. This has potential for diminishing the value of national honours.

Tight cap on honours

It is against that backdrop that we suggest that a tight cap be placed on the number of honours granted each year, especially those of the higher ranks and orders and that there need not be awards in specific categories in a given year if, in the view of those who oversee the Chancery of the Orders of the Societies of Honours, no one meets new, tougher criteria. In other words, the national awards should not only be coveted, but extremely hard to get.

Even with a significant higher bar we propose for those who receive national honours, there are two Jamaicans whose causes we have twice before championed, and whose pioneering and dedicated work in the area of human rights remain deserving of national honour. We refer, of course, to Dennis Daly and Flo O'Connor.

Sadly, illness limits Mr Daly's public activities, but for 40 years, starting in the 1960s, he was the pre-eminent champion of human rights in Jamaica. He was a founder of what was then the Jamaica Council for Human Rights.

As we noted in these columns more than four years ago, as we celebrated the national honour of Carolyn Gomes - a celebrated rights activist of a younger generation and of more recent vintage - in the 1970s and 1980s, when such causes were not popular, Mr Daly and Ms O'Connor stood for the rights of mainly inner-city youth who were in conflict with the law. Ms O'Connor, especially, faced ridicule.

New organisations and voices have emerged and new causes embraced, expanding the scope and breadth of human-rights activism. But we dare say that Mr Daly and Ms O'Connor did much of the spade work that makes today's efforts, as difficult as they may be, far easier than it might have been.

In that regard, it can only have been an oversight that they escaped the notice of the Chancery of the Orders of the Societies of Honours, and, therefore, the insignias and sashes they otherwise would have worn. That error, we expect, will be rectified this year.

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