Society must ensure people are prepared for parenthood

MY first reaction to the interview in this paper earlier this week with Roisin Shortall was one of dismay and anger, especially when I read that she felt that as a society we are rewarding young girls for having babies. How could anyone say that getting a little over £79 a week - out of which rent has to be paid, as well as everything else - to rear a child is a reward?

I got the impression initially that this was another case of bashing single mothers, which goodness knows is prevalent enough in our society as it is. Certainly the linking of lone parenthood with ghettos, neglect and abuse was hard to swallow, especially when we all know wonderful men and women rearing children on their own.

However, on reading the article more closely, I found I could not disagree with a lot of what she has to say: for example, what she says about how low income families are caught in a poverty trap, whereby young parents are actually encouraged by the system to live apart rather than marry or live together and bring up their children as a family.

The answer to this, surely, is that people must have a basic minimum income (as recommended by the Commission on Social Welfare as long ago as 1985), regardless of their marital or partnership status, and regardless of whether or not they have children. Until this happens, a third of our population will continue to live in the sort of poverty described in the Shortall interview.

Nor could I disagree with what Roisin Short all had to say with regard to education and with regard to responsible parenting. No more than many other Irish people, I do not like to see a situation where we have 32 year old grandmothers and trigenerational unemployment and drug addiction. In the United States, things have got so bad in places that they have had to put not just children but whole families into care. We none of us want that happening here. And if we don't want it to happen, we have to ask why all the neglect, the abuse and the dysfunctionality Ms Shortall describes exists.

But let's not get carried away by statistics. Roisin Short all tells us 70 per cent of babies living in Ballymun are born outside of marriage. This is no doubt true, but it is not that the people of Ballymun have a high rate of unmarried parenthood - rather it is that most of the people who are housed by Dublin Corporation in Ballymun are single parents. So what this statistic really tells us is that there is a big housing policy issue here.

In no area of life are the strata in our society more obvious than in the segregated way we house ourselves: on the one hand, we have built sprawling housing estates with no infrastructure and few amenities and facilities to house those who cannot afford to buy; and on the other hand we have our booming middle class suburbia with all its amenities, and more recently the development of tax incentive driven "luxury" apartment blocks in the inner city, built, bought and sold without real commitment to family life within the city.

With this intensity of private development, there are very few sites available for public housing. And not wishing to repeat the mistakes of the past, Dublin Corporation is buying up private houses and placing tenants in them, to the dismay of middle class people who see themselves as having saved their money in order to buy houses where they could feel safe from the people Roisin Short all is talking about.

With our class based housing system, we have created ghettos of privilege and ghettos of underprivilege. Meanwhile, single people without children are actively encouraged by local authorities not to seek public housing, because they have no hope of being housed, as priority is given to families.

It is the view of many of our government ministers - and I know, because I have heard them say so - that young people should stay at home with their parents until they get married. But where does that leave the families who can't afford to keep their adult children who are unemployed or in low payment employment? And where does it leave young people who for one reason or another need to leave their homes or who simply have reached the age where they need to assert their independence by setting up on their own?

Roisin Shortall quite rightly talks about the sort of education young people need to help them to find their place in society: our education system is completely directed towards academic achievement and intellectual development: it is not directed to help young people to develop as responsible citizens and eventually as responsible parents. Unless this situation changes, and primary education is seen as "primary" when it comes to funding, and alternative education is put in place, we will continue to have young people dropping out of school at an early age, with no qualifications, very little self confidence and almost no hope of getting work.

These children will become irresponsible parents, because we have been irresponsible towards them.

THE truth is that the whole situation is all about choices, priorities and values. Policies and choices can create irresponsible citizenship and irresponsible parenthood or the reverse. The gross inequalities we have in this country are the result of government policies and choices. Inequality is built into the way our society is ordered, and this is not conducive to responsible citizenship. Unless we tackle those structural problems, we will always have the kind of problems Roisin Shortall talks about.

And we do have these problems. And this is where Mrs Short all must take her responsibility as chair of the Eastern Health Board for the utter lack of preventive and remedial services within her region for those young women. We have children rearing children, but instead of condemning these young girls, or blaming them for the level of neglect and abuse of children we have in our society today, we must do everything we possibly can to help them now to be responsible parents. We must also acknowledge that this phenomenon is a symptom of the lack of care within the family, neighbourhoods and society in general, which encourages young girls to form relationships and have children for whom they can care and from whom they will receive unconditional love. _

Whatever health boards do to help these young people to become responsible parents, they need to help them in practical ways that they can make sense of.

There are already small efforts being made in this direction. For example, there is a transitional housing programme for young mothers and their children here beside me where I live in Stanhope Green, but it receives absolutely no funding from any government department. Practical measures such as this will have to be taken on board by the Eastern Health Board if it really wants to tackle the problem.

FRANKLY, I would like to see us dropping the label "single mothers" - with its air of disapproval - altogether. Instead, we should be trying to create a society that would encourage people not to become parents until they have reached a level of maturity at which they are capable of bringing up children and giving them the care they need. This applies to all levels of society and to couples as well as single people. But this won't happen unless we break the cycle of poverty and inequality and irresponsible citizenship.