Generations Apart

The Government is funding high-tech bleepers for elderly people living alone. A mobile phone company is developing a teddy bear which enables children in creches to communicate with their parents at work. Parents of teenagers are issuing them with mobile phones, while others are installing video cameras to spy on their younger children's paid carers; Email and networking have replaced face-to-face meetings. We are becoming disembodied in our relationships and within communities. As work takes over our time and our lifestyles, our emotional lives are being squeezed into boxes. We have moved from a life based on community to one driven by individualism - but that "freedom" may be deceptive. "The Irish have been psychologically colonised by the international mass media," says Dr Pat McKeon, a psychiatrist at St Patrick's Hospital, Dublin. "We're being overly influenced by, and not analysing critically, the value systems which are being presented to us; whether it's the way we run our health service or our economy."

The rule of the church has simply been replaced by a "new world order" of multi-national corporations which control finances and the media, according to Father Harry Bohan. He is founder of the Rural Housing Organisation and director of a conference, entitled "Are We Forgetting Something?", aimed at corporate decision-makers and to be opened by the President, Mrs McAleese, next month. "When these organisations shape a society, big numbers of people can become disempowered. The central principle of an alternative vision is the notion of personal or community responsibility, which enables and empowers people to take responsibility for their own future. "Irish society is experiencing changes which are both dramatic and rapid," says Father Bohan. "We have a huge demand for instant communication on a world scale and a parallel communication breakdown with each other, with family, with neighbours, with the inner self, with creation and with the creator.

"The question is this: with a booming economy and a parallel breakdown of trust with the older order, who now defines values and what now gives meaning to life? I believe that all of the progress we are making is wonderful . . . but there is very little discussion on the nature of the change." Two fundamental changes are ripping the soul out of Irish society: the demise of the churches' power and the economic riptide pulling women into the workplace. Both of these developments are generally regarded as positive, giving spiritual freedom to the individual and economic freedom to women. But we have avoided dealing with their far-reaching implications.

Law and order cannot replace values. Paid nannies and nurses cannot replace mothers, grannies and aunts. "Not to idealise the past, but people grew up with older people, such as grandparents, assisting their development and reinforcing their values," says Father Bohan. "Young people today grow up with a peer group. We tend to be breaking the links between the generations. Because the middle aged are so busy, we have to put the elderly into homes and forget them - and in many cases we are too busy to even visit them."

The chief executive of the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service in Dublin, Ruth Barror, says: "Everybody needs contact with older and younger people, otherwise you have a splintering of energy and the community becomes very fragmented. I'm concerned that by the time we start talking about the importance of community, the patient will already be dead. We have the State trying to buttress the family, but the State cannot replace a sense of community."

Older people are being driven apart from the rest of society by the media, which falsely portrays ageing as disastrous and the elderly as weak, dependent, vulnerable and under attack, says Michael Gorman (70) of the organisation Age and Opportunity, who worked for 40 years with Bord Failte.

The lack of a role in society is a major challenge when you're retired, says Gorman, who now works as a voluntary consultant in tourism and marketing through the Forbairt Mentor Scheme. "We need to be more positive about finding ways for older people to be involved in a vital way." The splintering of generations is a destructive social apartheid. There is a growing tendency for society to value anyone who is economically productive and regard everyone else - whether they are physically or mentally disabled, or simply elderly - as a burden.

Workplaces have high status and always call the shots. The informal system of supports which enables workers to keep working, is a melange of family, public, voluntary and entrepreneurial efforts which sometimes functions well and sometimes does not - usually with very little or inadequate regulation. An entire area of need - afterschool care - has been virtually ignored. Martina Murphy, director of the National Children's Nurseries Association, sees afterschool care as a crisis point for working parents. Children who haven't got aunts or grannies to take them in end up as latchkey kids by the age of 12. The lack of services is aggravated by the lack of flexibility in workplaces: Murphy cites the example of parents who last week were forced to miss their offspring's first day at school, leaving creche staff to accompany the children instead.

"A partnership approach to child care is needed," says Murphy. "While parents have the ultimate responsibility, initiatives in the workplace must be put in place to allow them to be available to their children at significant times such as illness. Parents should not have to apologise or be underhanded."

Work is number one - everything else must come second. But instead of fitting life into work, shouldn't we start thinking about fitting work into life? "In the last five years, more women have become paid employees than in the previous 20 years combined, but we still operate with a model of the male breadwinner and the woman in the home. You can't survive in Ireland these days without two incomes, yet we have had no real debate on what this means for the family," says Kieran Allen, lecturer in sociology at UCD.

Evelyn Cregan, mother of Harry (5) and Charlie (2) is head of operations at NatWest Reinsurance, where her 45-50 hour week includes travelling and working at home. Her husband Paul is sales and marketing director of Citroen. "For us the combined support of Sharavogue Preparatorial School and Creche, in Glenageary, and of very close families, in particular Harry and Charlie's grandparents, are what has enabled both of us to manage our respective jobs and the pressures of family life," she says. Evelyn is active in the Institute of Chartered Accountants which has commissioned a report, "Women in Accountancy", on the working environment for women and how it can be improved. CSO statistics show that two-thirds of new jobs created since 1987 have gone to women. The number of women in the workforce increased by 44 per cent between 1987 and 1997; the number of men by a mere 10 per cent. In just 10 years, the proportion of urban families with two career parents has increased by 10 per cent and the proportion of rural families with double-income couples has increased by 20 per cent. On the child care crisis, Dublin psychologist Eileen Colquhoun warns: "I think we could be creating an awful lot of problems for the future. A lot of this double-income and double-car family lifestyle relies on both parents being out of the house for 12 hours a day, and they don't get to see their child much. There's an awful lot of stress in keeping the whole thing going."

It would be foolish to idealise the past when few women worked outside the home. As Chris Whelan of the ERSI points out, the traditional multi-generational farm family was created in the late 19th century and was in decline from the mid-1930s. And the way we treat children is probably enormously better now than in the past.

At the same time, it is also foolish for us to refuse to face the reality of family life today and, through a lack of social policy and investment, to be forcing families to live in increasing isolation. "Couples today are suffering from a lack of friendship and social contact," says Ruth Barror. "They are too exhausted for friendship. Is this what we want? And if so, who wants it? Everyone is out there saying that this is the Celtic Tiger and they're going to go for it. But what are we going for? Society is changing so fast we have no time to think about which way we want it to go."

We could create a true golden age - not just an economic one - by changing work practices to make them "lifefriendly": enabling people to nurture their families and to maintain a healthy balance in their own lives between work and leisure. As Jayne Buxton argues in her ground-breaking book, Ending the Mother War, it is the multinational corporations who have a moral obligation to take the lead. Companies such as Xerox and Lloyds TSB have revolutionised their work cultures in order to keep family issues on the table alongside work issues - and they've got better business results.

At a chief executives' summit in New York last year, Xerox chairman and chief executive, Paul Allaire, said: "The bottom line is this: people who have a say in how work gets done have a greater sense of control over their lives. Workers with this sense of empowerment are more efficient, productive and satisfied on the job. A `family-friendly culture' is just one of the approaches we use at Xerox to unleash the full creativity of our employees."

It can be difficult to stand up to authority and ask for changes which would benefit family life, but we are not all helpless. The renowned consultant on work transitions, William Bridges, believes that a generation from now we will live in a de-jobbed world in which everyone is flexible and makes his or her own arrangements with employers. In Ireland, will we be miserable, high-tech workslaves? Or contented and balanced people who put life before work? It's time to decide.