Una Mullally: This will be the year of Fine Gael’s phoney epiphanies

We have the first new slogan from the new-old Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and it’s this: “Our vision is to make Ireland the best country in Europe to be a child.” There is of course a difference between a vision and a fantasy. We Totally Promise To Fix The Things We Broke isn’t exactly a slogan that inspires confidence, but it does seem to be the central tenet of this new-old leadership.

A new unit will be established in the Taoiseach’s department to focus on reducing child poverty and improving wellbeing, something I imagine came as quite the surprise to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, which over a decade ago was called the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, but apparently that wasn’t important enough to maintain as a single departmental focus.

Any time I hear Varadkar talk about child poverty, I think of his 2007 interview with The Irish Times where he callously “joked” that his least favourite Christmas film was A Christmas Carol because Tiny Tim “should get a job”. Presumably he has since changed his mind on child poverty, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for the evidence.

Fine Gael is something of a blackout party, and I’m not talking about our creaking electricity infrastructure. It’s as though they create ramshackle policy and make grave mistakes in some kind of haze, and wake up a few years later to find the gaff trashed, shocked by the consequences of their actions. 2023 will be the year of the party’s phoney epiphanies. Apparently they are now keen to clean up the mess they made, convinced of their capabilities, even though they won’t acknowledge they were the ones doing the damage.

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Child poverty

The electorate is being asked to suspend its disbelief and engage in the magical thinking that those who oversaw increases in child poverty; child homelessness (over 3,000 children and counting); childcare costs; paediatric waiting lists; children on hospital trolleys; children languishing without the educational, physical and mental health supports they need; have now awoken from this decade-long blackout, ready to retrace their steps and figure out what needs to be done.

Varadkar said he finds it “impossible to explain” why children wait so long to be assessed for special needs. Perhaps he would benefit from speaking to workers and parents in that area, considering they know the dysfunction firsthand. Plenty of opposition politicians can also explain the situation to him.

In government, Fine Gael consistently missed targets around child poverty. There is nothing to suggest this pattern will be broken. In October 2016, during a Dáil debate on child poverty, Varadkar said the national social target was to reduce consistent poverty “to 4 per cent by 2016 [and] to 2 per cent or less by 2020″. Here we have another failure. According to the CSO’s figures, consistent poverty in 2020 actually exceeded the 2016 figure, at 4.7 per cent. In 2021, the rate of deprivation in households made up of one adult with children under 18, was 44.9 per cent. Child poverty is born of adult poverty, with the housing emergency a large factor, a crisis caused by government policy.

In 2010, a target was set to lift over 70,000 children out of consistent poverty by 2020. In 2009, there were more than 96,000 children living in consistent poverty in Ireland. In 2022, the Children’s Rights Alliance stated the figure was 62,000. Like for like, the 2010 target didn’t achieve half of what was intended.

Childcare costs

During the recession, the school clothing and footwear allowance was slashed. Within two budgets, this vital financial assistance was halved from €200 to €100. It took Fine Gael in government a decade to reverse this cut, when in July 2022 the allowance was increased by €100 from €160 to €260. One wonders, in such an apparently wealthy country, what on earth took them so long. There’s that blackout again.

Childcare costs in Ireland are equivalent to a second mortgage for parents, if they’re lucky enough to own a home in the first place. A report by Unicef in 2021 found that Ireland – along with New Zealand and Switzerland – has the least affordable childcare globally for middle-class people in wealthy countries. Ireland is also the third most expensive country in Europe for childcare. That’s what happens when you leave childcare to the market. In many European countries, early childhood care is essentially free, or costs a couple of hundred euro a month. Irish childcare costs are not normal, and they’re a brutal financial burden for families.

If we are to become the best country in Europe to be a child, one obvious step towards that would be to hold a Children’s Assembly in the model of the Citizens’ Assembly, to centre children in policy development. There has been a National Youth Assembly on Climate, and there should be one on all policy that relates to children. Children’s voices are inexplicably absent from the policy decisions that affect them. Developing a children and young people’s assembly would be a hugely informative, progressive and beneficial process for legislators, society and young people themselves. If the so-called adults in the room can’t get their act together, maybe our young people can offer a dose of reality.