Time for a real debate on the role of marriage

The director of the newly-founded Iona Institute, David Quinn, is a brave man. In the current cultural climate, it takes courage to set up a think tank dedicated to "strengthening civil society" through "making the case for marriage and religion".

Perhaps it may seem odd to be congratulating him on his courage given that, at least according to this newspaper, I have achieved the status of a "well-known personage" who also happens to be a patron of the new organisation. However, patrons do little more than lend their names to an enterprise.

It is Quinn who has put his reputation on the line, and indeed his financial security. On reflection, it is exceedingly odd that merely endorsing the idea that a culture of healthy marriages and low divorce rates is good for society should require courage, but it does.

We have not yet reached a stage where we can discuss the need to support marriage without causing people to assume that this automatically involves stigmatising other family forms. Perhaps it is because we are uneasily aware that it is not so long ago that we went so far as to incarcerate single mothers in institutions where they were supposed to repent while we used them as conveniently cheap laundry labour. Or maybe it is because most of us prefer keeping our heads down to getting mired in controversy.

The Iona Institute aims to stimulate discussion, but I was a bit surprised that the first major discussion it stimulated for me was with a friend of 20 years, who is a lone parent with one son. Now, lest all my friends immediately take a vow of silence around me, I am reproducing our conversation with her full permission.

Mind you, I do think it undermines her credibility somewhat that when we were discussing a suitable pseudonym to protect her identity she immediately suggested Zorro, and only accepted the compromise of Elena, Zorro's daughter, with reluctance, despite Catherine Zeta-Jones's ass-kicking portrayal of the role.

Anyway, Elena or Zorro, whichever you prefer, wants to make a serious point.

She is heartily sick of Christian sources constantly trotting out the statistics which show that on many important social measures, children of lone parents do consistently worse than the children of those in low conflict, intact marriages. She feels that this is a terrible way to promote marriage, because it immediately makes lone parents feel defensive, and yes, stigmatised. She does not dispute the results of the research, but she believes that it is deeply unhelpful to keep highlighting them as if they were set in stone.

Yet Elena does not agree, either, with those who say that all family forms are equally good for children. She has many lone parent friends, and does not know one who would say that being a lone parent is preferable to raising a child with two committed married parents. They are all, however, fed up of their children being portrayed as if they were automatically destined for lower educational achievement and delinquency.

It is hard enough work being a lone parent, without dealing constantly with these kinds of dire prognoses.

Elena is herself a committed Catholic, but believes that Catholics cannot have it both ways. On the one hand, in an attempt to reduce the abortion rate, Catholics try to promote the idea that becoming pregnant outside of marriage is not the end of the world, and that solutions can be found to the problems faced by those unexpectedly pregnant. On the other, when it comes to promoting marriage, all the negative outcomes associated with lone parenthood are trotted out.

She believes that a much more effective approach would be to help in every way those who are lone parents to maximise their children's potential. Some of that might be in the form of financial support from the State, but also in support from the community. She believes that lone parents and their children are in a much more challenging situation but that with appropriate support and help that a child of a lone parent has just as much chance of growing up well-rounded and happy.

When I pointed out to her that some advocacy groups would have problems with her idea that being born into a lone-parent family is in itself any disadvantage, albeit one that can be overcome, she launched into a litany of things that are harder if you are parenting alone. If you run out of milk at night, you have to wait until the morning because you can't leave the child in the house alone and you can't hustle him or her out of bed, either.

It is more work keeping the other parent informed and involved, even about events like school plays or matches, and a child has to ring dad or mum about important events that in a marriage situation would just be reported at home. It often involves financial sacrifice, and in Elena's case, putting a promising career on hold indefinitely, because her child takes priority. She feels that it is important to promote marriage, but that the most effective way is through education and reasoned debate, and that it is possible to do it in a way that does not stigmatise lone parents.

Elena makes no claims to being representative, but she does provide proof that positions are not as polarised on the issue of marriage as the media would often like to portray, including in some knee-jerk reactions during the week. A huge amount depends on how the debate is presented.

As the recent opinion poll commissioned by the Iona Institute shows, a majority of Irish people still support, and want the State to support, the two-parent family and marriage. Most people would support removing disincentives to marry from our tax and welfare code, for example.

But for a real debate to happen, some people will have to put aside their automatic suspicion of anything stemming from an institute directed by a prominent Catholic layperson like David Quinn, and advocates for marriage will have to listen carefully to people like Elena.

This is an issue on which all people of goodwill, from whatever political or spiritual standpoint could co-operate on, while agreeing to disagree on other issues. For the sake of our children, it is too important an issue to ignore.