The Budget controversy has focused us on the one issue that will be most important for the quality of Irish life at the dawn of the 21st century: the family. It has also highlighted how, after a century that has transformed family life, the Government has no vision of how to nurture it.
Our anxiety about the state of the family has been growing for the past 25 years, through debates on contraception, divorce and abortion. As the 20th century closes, disquiet is growing over whether the family can retain its power as the prime source of psychological health, moral guidance and social equilibrium - what the Constitution calls, "the fundamental unit of society".
"The Budget was more an employment policy than a family policy," says Gabriel Kiely, professor at the family policy unit at UCD, reflecting the widespread concern that we have a Government with no vision of family life.
The Budget has been accused of "weakening the family" by those who allege it encourages women to work outside the home. The struggle to balance work and family life is, once again, piquing the guilt of a generation of mothers who choose to work outside, as well as inside, the home. However, there has been pitifully little debate about the role of fathers in family life. Nor are we anxious to talk about families where neither parent has an economic role due to the poverty-trap, which will blight one-third of our children not just today, but for generations into the next century. While debate in the media centres on family values, behind the scenes families are disintegrating under the stresses of social exclusion. Others are keeping themselves afloat, but not without feeling powerless, trapped and utterly discounted. "We are in a society where money is everything and people like myself are being completely left behind," says Peter McCarthy, a lone father rearing two young children aged six and five on an income of £210 a week, from which £60 per week goes on part-time childcare. He gained nine pounds per week from the Budget, which also left him - once again - in a situation where it is not worth his while to work full-time, even though he wants to. This further undermines his dignity, which he strives to maintain by doing voluntary work.
"You are made to feel as though you are sitting on your arse doing nothing as a lone parent. You might as well sit at home and let the State treat you as a piece of crap. It's completely and utterly a trap and it will never change."
There is a disturbing feeling in the air that more and more parents feel like Peter - gutted and disempowered. There is also growing disquiet that as parents lose control, family values are being imposed on the family from without, rather than growing from within. "I think that behind all of this is the fact that we have a lack of vision over how to balance work and family life," comments Jenny Bernard, childcare adviser with the Western Health Board.
Noirin Hayes, head of the School of Social Science and director of the Centre for Social and Educational Research at the Dublin Institute of Technology, agrees: "One of the issues that this Budget has unleashed is the lack of any vision of the relationship between the State and families in respect of children. "There is no consideration at policy level for children. It seems to me from listening to commentators that people equate a policy about children - a child-sensitive, child-intuitive approach - with a childcare policy . . . The relationship between the State and the family and the impact it has on children is not being considered at all."
Parenting itself is under threat as parents finds their influence undermined by the media, the Internet, the education system and economic demands. Marie Murray, head of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview, a family therapist and a best-selling author, says: "A society which does not give mothers who so choose the opportunity to stay at home with their children, which does not structure itself to allow fathers to spend time with their children, or which creates an economic milieu such that parents, in order to maintain a similar lifestyle to their own parents or peers, have to work, is placing the focus on the family as an economic structure rather than a place which fosters the psychological, social or mental health of its members."
The children who will lead us in the 21st century have already learned that the core value of our society is economic achievement and consumerism. At the same time, they have lost the protection of the family as a haven from a heartless world. These two factors come together in the issue of precocious sexuality, an issue that concerns many parents as the century closes. "The protection afforded childhood and the aspirations to safeguard the innocence of childhood that began in the 17th century is being eroded at the end of the 20th century," believes Murray. Before the invention of childhood in the 17th century, from the age of three children played adult games, were mixed with older children and were not regarded as innocent and in need of protection from sexual information.
"Ironically, at the end of the century we are once again in a situation where children have access to the adult world, to adult ideas and behaviour, in many of the clothes marketed for children, in their access to television and Internet and depictions of adult relationships," adds Murray.
Roisin Shortall, TD, believes government policy encourages parents' lack of control by disempowering parents. She links childhood anti-social behaviour to the fact that parents are no longer able to control their children because they no longer feel that they have this right and responsibility. The weakening of the family was the major concern to emerge from Conference '99: Our Society in the New Millennium, organised by Father Harry Bohan in Ennis in November. "I believe that the real struggle that is going on in Western society is not the apparent battle between right and left, or between socialism and capitalism or between church and State but the real battle that has been taking place has been between the family and the big organisations that have taken power away from it," says Father Bohan. "Our Constitution keeps saying that the family is the basic unit of society but everything that has happened this century has disempowered the family, and that has never been debated or wondered about. Up to the 1950s, the two systems that kept Irish society together were the family and the community. They were the elements of human organisation around which everything revolved.
"Since the 1960s, we find the isolated nuclear family as it exists today. What we call in the Constitution `the fundamental unit of society', is now an isolated, fragile, social unit quite unable on its own to sustain any one of the functions that it had in pre-modern times. Then, education, trade and skills were learned within the family. Today the State has entered the area of family life. We now have a whole factory system of organising life - which is controlled by the multinationals, the giant corporations, massive bureaucracy. The State, with all its Government departments, trade unions, farmers' organisations, professional organisations - all of them have isolated work from family life. The family has had no choice but to transfer its essential functions to impersonal, State, commercial or professional organisations," continues Father Bohan.
`The church has contributed to the demise of the family, by taking religion from the family and putting it into big buildings. Up to the late 19th century, religious events - weddings and funerals - were conducted within the family. Twentieth-century, church-centred religion has taken religion away from families, so that parents are unprepared to pass on values to their children. Even if parents remain pious church-goers, the majority would not have educated themselves in religious doctrines and beliefs. The majority would have an under-nourished faith which may survive for them and not for their children."
Steve Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, told The Irish Times earlier this year that if business leaders did not find ways to nurture family life by re-organising work and creating an inclusive society, they "would kill the goose that laid the golden egg". At the crassest, most selfish level, people reared in difficult families will not be able to work. Emigration shattered families in the 1950s. Today, the demands of the economy are shattering families, by making families like airports, where people meet coming and going, Father Bohan points out. Today, parents are spending 40 per cent less time with their children and rarely eating family meals together. In The Seven Habits, Covey suggests that every successful family needs to sit down together once a week and discuss its direction. But to do this, he points out, a family needs a compass.
Our problem in the Republic today is that have lost the compass. And without it we are ill-prepared for the challenges of the 21st century.
