The children's charity Barnardos has set out what may seem a rather grand ambition: to make Ireland the best place in the world to be a child. Using the famous phrase from the Proclamation of 1916 about cherishing all the children of the nation equally, it put forward yesterday the goal of making this aim a reality for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 2016.
If this aim seems large, however, it is also an extension into the collective realm of a common private desire. As the chief executive of Barnardos, Owen Keenan, pointed out, every parent wants the very best for their child. Why should the nation want any less for its children?
Though the much-quoted phrase from the Proclamation of 1916 was probably not intended to refer to children in the literal sense, the very fact that it has acquired a different meaning suggests that the desire to cherish all our children has deep roots in our culture. The collective sense of grief that was so evident at the funeral Mass for Robert Holohan in Midleton last weekend was eloquent testimony to the shared belief that a child in trouble is everybody's child. Yet, even without the statistics that tell us that 66,000 Irish children still live in consistent poverty, almost every primary school teacher in the land could cite cases of little children whose lives are already a constant struggle with the effects of deprivation, drug and alcohol abuse, educational disadvantage and inadequate parenting. The work of many agencies, Barnardos among them, has shown that early and intelligent intervention can transform the prospects for these children.
The lot of children in general may be massively improved since the Dubliner Thomas Barnardo founded his children's charity in 1866, but there are also new problems and challenges. Even the welcome economic and technological advances in Ireland over the last decade have created new threats, ranging from long working hours for parents to ubiquitous sexual imagery and novel forms of abuse and exploitation. And, in a highly competitive labour market, the consequences of educational disadvantage are, if anything, greater than ever.
Complacency about the lives of children would therefore be misplaced. Real progress has been made in recent years in Ireland and the tools for meeting the challenge thrown down by Barnardos yesterday have been gradually assembled, with the development of the National Children's Strategy, the establishment of the Ombudsman for Children and the National Children's Office. No one, surely, can disagree with Barnardos' aim. The problem, indeed, may be that bland consensus on the desirability of the aim may rob the issue of the urgency that will be required to achieve it. Passion and commitment, not lip service, will be needed from families, from civil society and from Government, if the goal is to be reached. The prospect of looking back over the century since the Republic was declared in 1916, from an Ireland in which all our children have reason to be glad they live here, makes this aspiration worthwhile.