The Budget uproar has focused on the figure of the mother in the home, but it is the demise of the father that has been the single most significant factor in family life this century. "The family has dramatically and radically changed from the beginning to the end of the century. When one looks at the family now, and at the last turn of the century, it looks like two different institutions. The only common denominator is that both types of family have parents and children," says Gabriel Kiely, professor of the Family Studies Centre at UCD.

In 1900, a family meant two parents, children and often a grandparent. A mere two per cent of births were outside marriage - compared to 28.3 per cent today. The family was strong because economic survival outside the family was impossible. Intimacy was secondary and, if intimacy needs were not met, the marriage was unlikely to break down. Women were valued entirely by their contribution to the functioning of the family, and life for single women was bleak.

Today the dominant functions of the family are intimacy and emotional needs, which have placed new pressures on the family and led to increasing marriage breakdown. The marriage rate is also dropping. Fatherhood has gradually lost its status since 1900, when the family was hierarchical and all authority was vested in the father as provider and social validator. By 1999, this had been reversed and the mother is now the decision-maker.

"Validation comes from your education and profession, rather than your father," says Kiely. "This raises the question of what the roles of fathers will be in the next century. At the moment, they appear to be moving into redundancy."

In Dr Kiely's study of fathers in the Republic, it emerged that "mothers are clearly the managers. They take care of the children, do the household tasks and make most of the decisions. The father, on the other hand, appears to do very little around the house except household repairs, play with the children, decide on what TV programme to watch, and [fathers] are unlikely to change this low level of participation unless their wives become sick or go to hospital."

The much-heralded New Age father of the next century has yet to manifest himself, Dr Kiely believes. Instead, we have the nonfather, whose function stopped at the moment of conception. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mountjoy Prison, where 72 per cent of the male inmates (average age 25) are fathers - usually as a result of common-law relationships and often with children from several different mothers. The governor of Mountjoy Prison, John Lonergan, says: "I cannot count the number of times a woman has come to me with two or three babies and asked me to let the father of her children out because he is the bread-winner. Here he is, the main breadwinner, and he's lying down in Mountjoy. There is no connection between having the children and being responsible for them. How can any society feel comfortable while that's happening?"

In the past, prisoners were social dropouts, occasionally with alcohol problems. Today, prisoners are parents (95 per cent of female inmates are mothers), often with drug problems. "The first thing they do is father a child. They think it's great. This was unheard of when I took over Mountjoy in 1984-85," says Lonergan. "It's phenomenal, appalling and very, very frightening to think that so many people have fathered children in an ad-hoc way with no structure or stability around what we used to call the family. It is inevitable that there will be chaotic consequences for the family."

The culture of bringing children up to the prison to visit is no more evident than at Christmas time. "Women are introducing very young babies to their fathers in prison. It is becoming a family tradition for children, coming in through the big heavy gates, signing in, absorbing the obvious prison context. By the time the child is five or six, the regular day out is going to Mountjoy to visit Dad. How can prison be a deterrent for a child who grows up going to prison?" asks Lonergan.

The deprived areas where the parent/prisoners come from are so mired in poverty, dysfunction, drug abuse, poor education, violence and child-battering that "it would take a miracle to rescue the children", Lonergan adds. If you want to see the bleakest view of the 21st century Irish family, look no further.