Families should be celebrated in all their diversity, writes Olivia O'Leary, who chaired a series of public consultations on the family
I came from a family of eight children, and I thought for years that that was how families had to be: large, rumbustious, noisy. So at Christmas time, I'd fuss about setting a long table, preparing an epic meal and then wonder why my own small household with our only child didn't quite fill the space. Until one Christmas, when, because I was ill, dinner was served in front of the fire at a table just big enough for us: intimate, simple and lovely - the right-sized Christmas for our family.
And that's how it's stayed, because I had discovered something important: each family is different. Each family has to establish its own traditions, be a family in its own way. Too often, we assume that we have to do things as our parents did, that we are failing in some way if we don't measure up to some traditional picture of family. That sense of tradition weighed heavily in Ireland, perhaps, because of the emphasis placed on a particular notion of family in the Constitution, and because for so long the State stood back from interfering with the family. This has resulted in a country where, as John McGahern puts it, there was very little notion of civic society but instead a country which consisted of "hundreds of little republics called families" which ruled supreme within their own borders.
Ireland has changed, however. Irish families have always been more diverse than the traditional mother/father/children model, but in the last decade alone, they have changed even more. We have many single-parent families. We have families brought up by grandparents. We have separated families who may live in two different households but who are still families.
Indeed, in travelling around the country to chair these five consultation sessions, I was struck by the overwhelming wish of people to give as wide a definition as possible of family. In Donegal, someone went as far as to suggest "a community of caring people" and it was interesting how often the word "community" arose in efforts to define family. For many people, it was impossible to consider the state of the family without considering the state of the community in which that family was based.
What came across in the Family Fora was an extraordinarily rich mixture of personal experience, social comment and sheer wisdom. We heard about the poverty which undermines families - the financial and housing and health problems which place unbearable strain on a family struggling to stay together. We also heard about the time poverty imposed on families where both parents work and where commuting takes up so much of the working day. We heard the anger of those who have sacrificed careers to care for children or for disabled or ageing relations, and who go unrecognised and unrewarded by a society which has benefited so much from their work. One woman felt that as a result, she was "nobody" in the eyes of the State.
Another young woman wondered about an education system which taught her to value skills which would make her economically successful, but not the skills which would make her a good parent. "Have I been educated beyond caring?" she asked.
We heard of increasing marital breakdown and the challenges posed to family relations when mother and father live in separate households. But we heard too from those who pointed out that people can learn lessons from the traumatic experience of break-up and can mature and develop as a result.
We heard how every Government policy, from housing to transport to employment to education to health, affects the family and heard that too often Government policy-making is not family-proofed.
Most important of all, though, we heard people talking about what they know best - their own experiences of their own families.
It was an extraordinary privilege to be allowed listen as people drew lessons from their own lives which they felt would improve the Government's approach to policy-making.
Sometimes stories were told with wry humour, such as that of the woman who, because of housing prices, has her grown-up children still living with her. Sometimes they were told with deep emotion, such as the many people who spoke of the relations whom they cared for and protected every day of their lives.
There was one contributor, however, who said what we had perhaps forgotten in our attempts to address structures and services and family support systems. She said it with such feeling that the whole room burst into spontaneous applause, so I'll take it that she speaks for all of us.
In the end, families, she said, should be about warmth. Families, she said, should be about love.
• Olivia O'Leary chaired five regional Family Fora, organised last year by the then minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Coughlan. This is her introduction to Prof Mary Daly's Report of Public Consultation Fora, Families and Family Life in Ireland, published by the Department of Social and Family Affairs earlier this year