How children were cared for in Ireland today would have been totally unacceptable to our Victorian predecessors, the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Robin Eames, said yesterday.
"Children are dropped with minders as early as 6 and 7 o'clock in the morning and may not be reunited with parents until 12 hours later," he said. "Will family life be improved if children spend 12 hours a day in care?"
The reality of family life in Ireland today was "where two adults needed to work in order to afford to buy, or indeed to rent, accommodation, given that in many cases rents are as high as a mortgage might be."
Blaming the cost of housing, he said many families struggled with the daily commute to jobs in distant cities, and solutions to their problems called for more than just additional childcare places.
What had happened was due to "the failures in infrastructural planning where families are forced further and further away from economic centres to find affordable housing," he said.
The problem arose because of geographically spread development "but, sadly, less geographically spread employment."
In his presidential address to the Church of Ireland General Synod, which opened in Dublin yesterday, Archbishop Eames said: "I hear of young mothers whose only waking time with the baby is when the little one wakes crying during the night before a working mother has to stagger back out on the commuter trail at an astonishingly early hour next morning."
He quoted a comment last March by the Minister for Social and Family Affairs Seamus Brennan, who said: "A lot of my colleagues, and that includes the Opposition, realised a number of things they hadn't known before these by-elections [ in Meath and Kildare] - finding out that people are getting up at 5.30 am, dropping the kids off at the creche before work and not getting home until 7 pm."
He urged government in both jurisdictions "to start addressing the needs of real families as they try to earn a living and provide a home environment where children can be raised to become good members of society."
He called "urgently" for government to aim for solutions that enhanced the experience of family for children, however that family might be composed.
Looking at the contemporary Irish family he observed: "The last three decades have almost eradicated the old reality of parents, children, grandparents and close relatives, all living in sufficient proximity to offer support to one another.
"Now, in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, approximately one in three children is born to an unmarried and often single parent.
"Economic development frequently drives young parents to live at a considerable distance from the family support network as they seek employment or affordable housing."
He noted that the Church of Ireland, in its submission to the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, had asked the State to embrace in its definition of the family the reality where two adults needed to work so they could afford to buy or rent accommodation.
Where the church was concerned there had never been a more important time for it to engage actively in public debate about the structure of society and what the core values for family life should be.
The traditional Irish family had changed radically due to economic and structural circumstances, Archbishop Eames said, and he asked: "What now for the tradition we like to call 'the Christian family'?"
