The Green Party is not known for jocularity but, surely it’s having a laugh. Amid the coalition’s pre-Budget auctioneering negotiations, they’ve come up with a real corker. “What do you guys want?” asks novice Minister for Finance, Jack Chambers. “A €560 baby boost paid for all newborns,” replies novice Green leader Roderic O’Gorman. Yes, folks, that’s the equivalent price of a pretty magnolia tree for the front lawn, courtesy of the State, for every burgeoning family from Sandycove and Sutton to D4 and Glandore. Did someone mention a general election?
On the basis that €560 is quadruple the €140 monthly child benefit and that 54,678 babies were born in Ireland last year, the extra cost to the exchequer of the Greens’ universal baby bounty works out at €23 million, annually. Let’s hope all those babies grow up to manage their money more judiciously.
Visiting Martians, unused to a culture of vote-buying, must think Ireland is daft. Not only has it ditched a proposal to introduce two-tier child benefit payments to account for the lesser financial needs of the better-off, but it’s talking about giving every new parent – whether living below the poverty line or above the millionaire line – the same amount of lolly for having a baby. Meanwhile, news headlines and newscasts are constantly telling of some children’s appalling hardships and inequalities.
The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services is scandalously under-resourced. It was reported recently that there are 18,588 children on waiting lists for psychology appointments. Holly Cairns, the Social Democrats leader, obtained data from the HSE in June that showed 105 young people in the Cork/Kerry region were waiting for four to five years for intervention. Another 1,364 had been waiting at least two years. While they wait, their health deteriorates.
Other children deemed to be at risk to themselves or others, because in many cases they have been abused or neglected, cannot be accommodated in appropriate safe settings because the State does not provide a sufficient number of places. A judge quoted in the Child Law Project’s most recent report predicted a looming “tsunami” and asked, “What would we do when someone has to explain where a child who should have been in special care commits suicide or dies?”
One child in every five is living in deprivation in our reputedly rich republic. By last year’s headcount, there were 1,255,738 children in Ireland. Of that number, more than 131,000 – almost 11per cent of the child population – had a disability. Another 8,165 children were carers for family or friends, according to a State of the Nation’s Children 2023 report by O’Gorman’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. There are 4,401 children with nowhere to call home, trying to get to school and do their homework while shuffling between various locations of emergency accommodation.
On the other end of the scale are the four in every five children who are not living in poverty but in comparative comfort. While it is as foolhardy to judge how children are treated behind the walls of a mansion as behind the walls of a council flat, the data show overwhelmingly that certain children need greater State support than others.
A Green Party spokesman has said the proposal for a “baby boost” payment is meant to help parents with the financial costs of a new baby. Yet studies have repeatedly shown that most of the estimated €250,000 cost of raising a child is incurred during the second and third levels of education. You can buy a basic stroller for €60 and Ikea has cots starting at €89, but you might need a loan to feed an insatiable growing teenager or to pay for college books and rent.
A report on the minimum essential standard of living published in the summer by the Society of St Vincent de Paul stated that the expenditure for a child of 12 or older is 60 per cent higher than for younger children.
You can buy a basic stroller for €60 and Ikea has cots starting at €89, but you might need a loan to feed an insatiable growing teenager or to pay for college books and rent
It would make more sense for the Government to use the €23 million ensuring that children are not left stranded by ghost school buses, as they were again last month, or expanding the excellent free school meals initiative. Thus the expenditure directly benefits the child rather than being left to discretionary spending by the adults in the home.
Even the most interfering nanny state cannot guarantee that a baby boost paid to parents is actually spent on the child rather than being splurged on a spa weekend or a new golf putter.
A longitudinal study of trends in maternity care from 2009 to 2017 – the post-economic crash years when wealth shrank – reported that 24.8 per cent of mothers opted for private or semi-private healthcare. If you check the websites of the National Maternity Hospital or the Rotunda or Cork University Hospital, you will see that the standard charge for a single-occupant room is €1,000 per night. Holles Street quotes private consultants’ fees at €2,500 to €5,000. These figures suggest that at least one quarter of newborns’ parents are not in dire need of a €560 baby bonus. It might, however, sweeten their voting intentions.
It is alarming to read some of the online comments responding enthusiastically to reports about the “baby boost” proposal. Bring it on, they say, as an incentive for more baby-making to counteract Ireland’s ageing population. It’s an argument that echoes the commodification of human reproduction and the higher value put on women who are capable of bearing children in The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel which its author Margaret Atwood has chillingly declared contains no horror that has not happened somewhere in the past.
After the failure in March of the referendum to repeal the Constitution’s enshrinement of women’s role in the home, a baby bonus conjures up the vista of more hand maids at the service of the State, at least according to some of its supporters.
The Green Party has done commendable work in this Government. The proliferation of bicycle paths and greenways bear testament to its influence within the Coalition. That makes its baby boost Budget proposal all the more disillusioning. Laugh? You could cry.