Irish families are in rude health, embracing change and difference despite a system that discourages both
OUR SMALL, pretend family greeted the new millennium with consternation when our then six-year-old realised that somewhere in a forest in Co Wicklow we had not one but two trees. It was a lovely gesture to issue “every home in Ireland” with a certificate giving details of the location of the tree planted “for each family” in the Millennium Forest. The problem started in our house when we received two certificates.
“Are your parents married?” our senior infant demanded of his friend. Turns out they were. His friend’s family had one tree.
This was outrageous, he railed. “They think we’re not a family.” With this second tree his “family” had gained inverted commas.
Now, one might think, getting twice as much as the next family should be a cause for celebration. Oh no. In this case, the light bulb moment the kid had just encountered was that all families are not equal. Not in the eyes of the State, anyway.
According to the 2006 census, referred to in a recent ESRI/UCD report into family structures in Ireland, almost 300,000 children are raised outside the marital family. That’s a lot of trees. And those children are raised in all sorts of families – families with two mums or two dads, families with one mum or one dad, families with one mum some of the time but dad at weekends, families of happily unmarried mum and dad, families of Granny and Auntie Dympna, families of Uncle Eric and Uncle Seán, families with foster parents, families with money, families with little money but a lot of love, families with love and money and a kitten ...
Writing recently in the Irish Independent, David Quinn, polemicist and head of the Iona Institute conservative think tank held up the traditional family based on marriage as the gold standard, worrying that “the family in Ireland is not in rude good health, far from it”.
Actually, families are in rude good health. In all our complex forms. We are in rude good health because we are embracing change and difference and learning to live with each other in different ways in the face of a system that encourages none of the above.
The Fine Gael/Labour programme for government contained a commitment to mark the 75th anniversary of the Constitution next year with a convention to revisit several areas that need discussion in this changed era.
Article 41.1.1 states: “The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society: as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”
This clause informs much Irish social policy. Families should take responsibility for and have primacy over their own welfare. But which families? “Gold-standard” families of course. The moral certainty attributed to married families by God himself makes State meddling or progressive social policy changes that recognise and support alternative family structures a big no-no. The rights of children are still vying for consideration.
The family, on which the Irish State depends for its “social order”, is backboned by marriage. Heterosexual marriage. Imagine what a threat to this social order all those children of gays, lesbians, lone parents and cohabiters might pose if they were encouraged or, heaven forbid, empowered.
According to article 41.3.1: “The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”
Can I just say to anyone remotely concerned that, by choosing not to get married, people like myself and my partner of more than two decades (two kids, quite well-adjusted – considering) present no threat to other people’s life-partnership choices.
Not being married has cost us – not emotionally, but financially. We were, rather conveniently for a State that loves a good wedding, treated as a couple for social welfare purposes (he had to support me when I had the kids); yet we were total strangers when it came to taxes. He also had to support me and the kids without getting the same allowances as a married man with the same “family” responsibilities.
To be fair, at least it proves that all the State-supported proselytising about getting hitched is backed up with rugged financial measures that should act like the proverbial shotgun. We dodged the bullet.
But if one of us gets run over by a bus tomorrow, it will mean that 25 years, two kids and 1,000 episodes of Match of the Day later, legally, we are “strangers”. A married man does not have to pay tax on anything he inherits from his wife. After 25 years my other half can inherit only €16,000 tax-free from this dead woman.
Any money we ever manage to gather is meant to be for our sons (see, not so different from the “gold standard” couple, are we?). But our children, the children of two unmarried refuseniks, will see half their inheritance going to the Revenue before their last parent shuffles off their mortal coil. And I always thought all the children of the nation were going to be treated equally.
All is not lost, though. Denied a sniff at any inheritance, my son says that at least he has a tree to sell. And that’s where we came in. My sons will have no money, but they have a tree.
Ireland’s millennium forests are full of variation. The woodland project embraces difference – it’s enriching, not threatening. All types of trees are encouraged, officially planted or not. There is no room for imposition of sameness, because nature knows that difference is what suits us all best.