Human needs, not profits should drive family policy

Imagine if Bank of Ireland was informed that its ATMs were spitting out receipts with soft porn on the back. The ensuing panic would probably only be surpassed if the machines were issuing free €50 notes.

Yet it was perfectly acceptable, at least until they got caught, to invest in a highly profitable company which markets so-called top-shelf porn magazines on increasingly lower shelves in newsagents. It was just business, after all. In the world of business, it appears that whatever needs to be done to increase profit should be done, regardless of how it conflicts with alleged core values.

Maybe it's time we moved beyond the idea that business and profit are the highest goals to which human beings can aspire. It has led us down sad cul-de-sacs. For example, every effort is being made to encourage women to enter the paid workforce. Few, it seems, pause to ask themselves what the long-term effects of this heavy-handed social experiment may be.

Take individualisation of tax, which penalised single-income families. The first steps were introduced in Budget 2000. It may or may not be a coincidence that a recent study of four-year-olds - those who were toddlers at the time of that Budget - shows that one in three are overweight.

Obviously, there is more than one factor at work here, but a connection with individualisation is more than possible. When both parents are out at work, there is far less time to prepare nutritious food. The sales of ready-made meals, which tend to be higher in sugar, salt and fat, have soared. Kids do a lot more eating in cars. Breakfast bars are composed of up to 70 per cent simple carbohydrates. Frazzled parents grab them on the way out the door so that their children will not go to the crèche or school with an empty stomach.

People are doing their best to juggle impossible levels of stress at home and at work. Something has to give, and children's health may be the collateral damage accruing from the pursuit of the aim of alleged equality in the workforce.

Lip-service is paid to the idea of choice. In fact, the choice amounts to a woman, or indeed a man, being valued for any work that she or he wants so long as it is in the paid workforce.

This blinkered attitude is reflected in many official publications. Last year the Department of Social and Family Affairs launched some OECD research entitled Babies and Bosses - Reconciling Work and Family life. Sounds great, until you realise that the report assumed that the majority of women were primarily concerned with being facilitated to enter or to remain in the paid workforce.

Aine Ni Ghiollagain, vice-president of Women in the Home (WITH), wrote to the OECD with some questions. She pointed out that the title of the research was misleading because there was little or nothing in it about providing people with real choice that would include supports to work in the home.

She also queried the claim made that "As in most OECD countries, women in Ireland, Austria and Japan (the subjects of the research) increasingly want work and careers." No such research has been carried out in Ireland, so how could such a claim be made? She also objected to the fact that the word "work" was generally used only to refer to participation in the paid workforce.

The response was interesting. The author, Willem Adema, acknowledged that there was indeed no research, but claimed that the "revealed preferences", especially of younger Irish women, showed that women were voting with their feet. The fact that the numbers of women under 30 in the workforce had doubled in the last 20 years was an indicator that women were exercising choice.

This analysis completely ignored the fact that many women feel they must participate in the workforce in order to pay a mortgage, and that this puts incredible strain on them at a time when they are also most likely to have small children.

A publication from the Department of Social and Family Affairs last month appears to reflect a wider spectrum of opinion than Babies and Bosses. Families and Family Life in Ireland - Challenges for the Future is a report on the forums on family held around the country. There was disagreement on how we should define family, but clarity on a number of issues:

"Ambivalence, it seems, is the lot of many mothers. Many women feel torn between children and work. One of the most strongly and consistently expressed views was that mothers must have more options or choice around whether they want to take up paid employment."

Significantly, lone parents feel even more ambivalent about the push to force everyone into the workforce, because the presence of the only parent is seen as crucial.

This is all very well, but is anyone listening? I have a telephone directory-sized report on family sitting on a shelf just in front of me, called Strengthening Families for Life. Produced in 1998, it made clear recommendations that the work of parents and carers in the home must be recognised and supported financially. Yet we still have a means test for carers, and more and more two-parent families now have both at work.

It might startle many people to discover that in Ireland more than 20,000 families look after relatives' pre-school children free, while more than 30,000 look after relatives' school-age children free. Most of those people are grandparents, aunts or neighbours. Already, such a resource is dwindling, and what will replace it? State-provided childcare? We cannot even provide beds for the seriously ill, so how are we going to provide that level of childcare? Should we even try?

Or should we facilitate more parents to care for their own children, especially in the crucial early years? No action will be taken on this unless people make their voices heard. With local and European elections looming, it is a good time to drag your weary-from-commuting body to the door, to demand from canvassers that policies be based on human needs for a change, and not on the great god, profit.