Life for Irish children has finally improved after decades of neglect. But are we about to let them down again?

THE LIFE OF THE IRISH CHILD:This week Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald acknowledged the State's role in the neglect and abuse of children. She also pledged to help ensure that Irish children will from now on have the best start in life. What does it mean to be a child, or a parent, in modern Ireland?

MARY STEVENSON was six. She was asleep when her foster father, Vincent Dunphy, came home at around midnight. He hauled her out of bed and demanded to know why she had left a facecloth in the basin used for washing. He took a towel off the bed and wrapped it in a ball around his right hand. He struck her on the face. She staggered back and fell. Then she got up again and came towards him. He asked her why she pretended to be asleep and she said she really had been asleep. Then he hit her again. About the fourth or fifth time he punched her she looked “a bit groggy” and slumped to the ground, dead.

Dunphy told gardaí that Mary was “difficult” and told lies. He said that he used to beat her “once or twice a week and sometimes once or twice a day”. After being beaten, he said, the child would put her arms around him and say: “I love you, Daddy.”

Neighbours testified that they had often seen the girl with bruises, scratches and black eyes.

This kind of extreme cruelty to a child can still occur today, but it’s what happened next in Dunphy’s trial for murder that takes us back to another era. Dunphy’s defence counsel pointed out to the jury that the dead child was a “waif and a stray, and a coloured one at that”. The judge, in his summing-up to the jury, warned them to “approach this case on the basis that the accused is a man who sincerely believes that physical punishment was the proper way to deal with any offences this child committed . . . It does not follow from the fact that there was regular punishment that it was necessarily given with the intention of causing serious injury or [that] what was done on this evening was something dangerous. It’s a matter for you to decide, but I think it is probable that when the child fell she struck her head, setting in motion a chain of events that resulted in her death.”

The jury took the hint. Dunphy was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. He was given a very light sentence of 12 months in prison. His actions in beating a six-year-old child to death were weighed against her “offences” and his sincere belief that he had the right as a parent to inflict such punishment.

The names make it obvious that this case happened in Ireland. It was, in fact, in Waterford. But when? In the dark 18th century, perhaps, or the Dickensian 19th century? No. It happened in 1968, in the Ireland of miniskirts and The Late Late Show,of shopping centres and lounge bars. The attitudes to children revealed in the case are just over 40 years old.

It is worth celebrating the fact that so much has changed for the better for Irish children in those 40 years. In recent years the horror stories from industrial schools and Catholic dioceses, and the abuse and neglect within families, have rightly dominated discussion of the place of children in Irish society. But the very fact that these stories have been told represents an enormous change. Even in the supposedly enlightened 1960s very few people wanted to listen, and even extreme violence towards a child such as Mary could be met with an ambivalent official response. Horrible things still happen to children, but at least they do evoke horror.

The most obvious thing about childhood in Ireland now is that there’s an awful lot of it. We have approximately 1.2 million under-18s, which is about a quarter of the population, a higher proportion than in any other EU state. In a much more literal way than in most developed countries, the wellbeing of our children is central to the wellbeing of our society.

A dispassionate look at the state of childhood in Ireland now tells us two important things. One is that shifts in social and official attitudes can make a hugely positive difference to the lives and prospects of kids. We know this because, in many areas, we’ve done it. The other thing we know, though, is that we’re at a point where much of this progress is being thrown into reverse. We can make things better for children, but, collectively, we’re choosing to make them worse.

There is, in Irish political culture, a strong sense that the welfare of children isn't just one measure among others. It is theyardstick by which we measure the worth of our society. It is striking that the most misquoted line of modern Irish rhetoric is the one in the 1916 Proclamation about "cherishing all the children of the nation equally". In fact, this is not a reference to children at all; instead, the image is of the nation as mother and the citizens as her children.

What’s telling about the constant misuse of this phrase, though, is that it draws attention away from a much bolder declaration that actually is about children. In its Democratic Programme, adopted in January 1919, the first Dáil made the firm statement that “it shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.”

This is a remarkable statement for its time, asserting that we’re not a republic if we don’t make the welfare of children our first priority. Given what actually happened in the first decades of the State, not least the enslavement and torture of children in the industrial-school system, it is not surprising that this brave declaration was forgotten. Vapid rhetoric about “the children of the nation” was much less embarrassing than hard questions about whether they were cold or hungry or badly educated.

BUT ARE WE any closer to being a child-centred republic now than we were in 1919? Well, yes we are. We’re a very long way from the destination, but there’s been a lot of movement in the right direction. Consider four big things: work, violence, school and parenting.

It is easy to forget that for much of the history of the State, children were considered to be economic units. Patrick MacGill, in Glenmornan(the name he gives to Glenties, Co Donegal, in his novel published in the same year as the Democratic Programme), writes frankly that "in Glenmornan, children are looked on as good investments". In the census of 1926, 16,500 children aged 14 or 15 were listed as being in full-time work on farms alone.

Until the 1960s many kids were expected to work on the family farm, or in the shop or pub, as soon as they could carry a load or count money. As late as 1964, only a third of 16-year-olds were in full-time education. Most of the rest were working, hired out for farm or domestic service from an early age. Legislation on school attendance, renewed in 1936, specifically allowed children to be withdrawn from primary schools for up to 20 days a year to do “light agricultural work on their parents’ land and for their parents”. Children went to work in factories and on building sites.

In 1936 Tom Johnson, who had drafted the Democratic Programme in 1919, spoke in the Senate of “a very reputable gentleman in the industrial world claiming publicly, under oath, that it was necessary to get young persons, more or less children, to do work in brick-making because they were more adaptable”.

We now take it for granted that young children shouldn’t work at all and that teenagers should work only limited hours.

It is easy to forget, too, that physical violence was a normal part of most children’s lives. The case of Mary Stevenson was an extreme one, but the assumption that it was okay for adults to hit children was accepted by many as common sense.

Two very significant changes have happened in this area over the past two or three decades. Corporal punishment, which was ubiquitous in primary schools and common at second level, was banned in 1982. The law on corporal punishment by parents didn’t change, and there is still permission to inflict “reasonable chastisement”. But a lot more parents have stopped availing of that permission.

We know this from the best source of information about what it's like to be a child in Ireland now, the long-term study Growing Up in Ireland.In its initial report on nine-year-old boys and girls, published in 2009, more than half of mothers (58 per cent) reported that they "never" smacked their children. Almost none used corporal punishment "always" and 11 per cent of mothers said they used it "now and again".

This still means that too many children get smacked. Too many are subjected to bullying at school as well. But given that we’re coming from a background of regular physical violence against kids, this is a huge change.

It reflects an even bigger change in children’s lives: their relationship to school and parents.

It is arguable that the single most positive change in Irish life over the past 50 years is one we now take for granted: the idea that children like going to school. School, especially primary school, used to be a fearful experience for many kids. It involved the constant threat of physical violence and the constant experience of verbal humiliation.

The Growing Up in Irelandstudy found that most kids now are not scared of school and teachers. More than a quarter of nine-year-olds said they always liked school, 67 per cent said they sometimes liked it and only 7 per cent said they never liked it. Similarly positive attitudes prevailed towards teachers, with only 6 per cent saying that they "never" liked their teacher.

For all the current panic about bad parenting, the evidence is that most Irish parents are doing a good job. The best kind of parenting is defined in the report as “an authoritative parenting style combining parental control with warmth and responsiveness”. A large majority of both mothers (77 per cent) and fathers (68 per cent) of Irish nine-year-olds are regarded as meeting this standard.

The next most common categorisation for both parents is an “indulgent” (permissive) style. Just 4 per cent of mothers and 7 per cent of fathers are considered “authoritarian”, while 3 per cent of mothers and 6 per cent of fathers are “neglectful”. In other words, even most of the “bad” parents err not on the side of cruelty and neglect but on the side of excessive indulgence. This has consequences, not least in alarming levels of childhood obesity, but it’s a more forgivable kind of failure than the naked cruelty that was often accepted as responsible parenting in the past.

Contrary to the worst fears of conservatives, the near death of the authoritarian Irish parent has not meant that feckless indulgence has become the norm. Other predictions of doom about the collapse of the Irish family, and the consequences for children, have not been borne out either.

There have been huge changes in the nature of the family: almost a third of births now are to single mothers, and fertility rates halved over the course of the 1990s, making smaller families the norm.

But it's important not to exaggerate the extent of these changes. Most Irish children still live with a mammy, daddy and siblings. Ireland's birth rate is still the highest across the EU, with 363,500 babies born between 2006 and 2011. Growing Up in Irelandfound a large majority of children (82 per cent) living in two-parent families, and almost half of those families have three or more children. (In Britain, by contrast, fewer than a fifth have three or more children.)

The vast majority of Irish children, in other words, still have a lot of significant others – mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings – in their lives. The image of the disconnected, solitary, alienated child is a distortion of the general reality. Most children get on “very well” with their parents (86 per cent said this about their mums and 83 per cent about their dads), have good friends (92 per cent said they had at least two) and, remarkably, feel safe in their neighbourhoods (95 per cent of children of all social classes said they felt safe “living around here” and 77 per cent said there were places to play safely near their homes).

None of this means that there are not far too many children suffering from poverty, neglect, bullying, feckless parenting or anxiety. But we can say that in these four areas of work, violence, school and parenting, it is arguably better to be a child in Ireland now than at any time in our history.

We can say, too, that in spite of the challenges of huge change in the nature of families, most kids have a reasonably positive experience of family, friends, school and community.

YET THIS EVIDENCE that Irish society can work better for children raises two stark questions. Firstly, why, even in the best of times, did we not make a coherent effort to extend those benefits to all children, in line with the promise of the first Dáil? A few figures tell a story of wanton governmental neglect that went hand in hand with the new awareness of the rights of the child. There were the 501 children who arrived in Ireland as “unaccompanied minors” and then went missing from HSE care between 2000 and 2009 (just 67 have been traced). Last year a further 11 went missing, of whom just five were subsequently traced. In the first six months of last year, 91 children were admitted to adult psychiatric units because no other facilities were available. Eleven of these children were under 16, the youngest 13.

Then there’s the fact that between 800 and 1,000 kids every year don’t even make it from primary school to secondary school.

And more than 23,000 children were on HSE waiting lists for speech and language therapy in 2010.

In 2002 the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government made an explicit commitment to reduce child poverty to 2 per cent by 2007. Even with the vast wealth of the boom years, there was no serious effort to reach this target. Now child poverty is rising rapidly: in 2009, one child in 11 was living in consistent poverty. Since then, unemployment and welfare cuts have added to their ranks.

This gives rise to the second question: is life for children still getting better? The overwhelming likelihood is that it’s actually getting worse. Rather than being protected from the worst effects of austerity, children are being sent to the front of the queue. Those who suffer are disproportionately concentrated in poorer families, where the worst effects of unemployment and welfare cuts are being felt. Huge cutbacks in education target children, and vulnerable children are worst hit. Schools for autistic children have closed and Traveller education has been decimated. Hundreds of children known to be at immediate risk are being left without protection.

This generation of adults is leaving its children a terrible legacy of financial debt. It is also borrowing from their futures in less tangible but more damaging ways. If Ireland wishes to be regarded as a republic, it has to ask itself whether it can fulfil the “first duty” it supposedly embraced in 1919.