At a moment when family life is changing its rhythm, switching from holiday to school mode, it may be appropriate to reflect on some aspects of Irish family relationships.
The post-summer return to school, and for other young people soon to university or to institutes of technology, is quite a dramatic moment for parents and children alike. In a sense it is the start of a new year.
Partly for that reason it has for long seemed to me that September, rather than January, is where the year really begins.
Even for many households without children - almost half of our total of 1.3 million households - the start of the academic year alters the pattern of their lives, at least during the morning rush-hour which suddenly becomes much more frenetic as many parents drive their children to school.
Of course, Irish family life has been undergoing major changes in recent decades.
More than a quarter of all family households are now headed by a lone parent or by a cohabiting couple. And this pattern is universal throughout the country: it is as true of Sligo and Leitrim as it is of DúLaoghaire and south Dublin.
Only Dublin city diverges from this ratio: there the proportion of households with children headed by a married couple has fallen as low as 63 per cent.
Moreover, in the case of married parents in their late 30s or upwards, most of whom will still have children of school age, at least 10 per cent of their marriages have ended in separation or divorce.
Clearly very many children are not growing up in traditional family circumstances, and our society has not fully adjusted to this new situation.
These changes in our society have occurred very rapidly. A generation ago - and I take a generation to be about 30 years - we still remained a very traditional society. Within this brief period, we have had to absorb the kind of changes that elsewhere were spread over two or three generations.
Yet Irish family life seems to have retained much of its strength. In particular, the relations between generations have largely survived the stresses emanating from the extraordinary rapidity of social change.
While I am not aware of any studies of the impact of these changes on families, I have a clear impression that in the great majority of cases the older generations - parents and grandparents - have not allowed whatever negative feelings they may have about changes in the social mores of the young to affect their relationship.
Within Ireland family relationships have, in general, been closer than in large countries like Britain and the US.
It is true that in the past many emigrants seem to have lost contact with their families in Ireland. Return visits were out of the question for the vast majority and right into the 20th century many were not equipped to write to their relatives at home.
They kept their sense of Irishness, and retained a strong sense of the locality in Ireland from which they came.
In an Irish graveyard in Connecticut some years ago I was deeply moved to see that on every single tombstone not just the county but also the townland of the emigrant's birth was recorded throughout the whole 19th century. But in most cases these emigrants lost all touch with home.
I lost contact with two grand-uncles in this way, and Joan lost touch with two uncles.
But within Ireland itself family relationships were cherished - and still are. Most young people remain in close contact with their families and their wish to do so is manifest in the extent to which university students tend to choose, whenever possible, the university nearest to their home.
Thus 85 per cent of students from Cork attend UCC, and only one out of eight go to one of the five universities outside Munster. And almost 80 per cent of Galway students go to UCG or the University of Limerick.
Moreover, each weekend there is a huge exodus of third-level students going home for the weekend - and not solely to have their laundry washed.
The contrast with England is striking. An article in last week's Sunday Times bemoaned the fact that, because of changes in the maintenance grant system, 34 per cent of English students intend this year to remain with their parents, attending universities in or near their place of residence.
That is twice as high a proportion as three years ago. "The whole tradition of students undergoing a separation no longer holds," the author quotes a psychology lecturer as saying.
"They are reborn into the family almost." Students wish to maintain their existing social networks in their home area, the author complained.
Some years ago I was puzzled by the fact that, per student, Britain then spent a bigger proportion of its GDP on higher education than any country except Japan - while having a very low participation rate in university education.
When I looked into it I found that because so much money was spent on supporting students away from home, there simply wasn't enough left to achieve an Irish level of third-level participation.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that in very many cases the, now weakening, English tradition of students preferring a university far from their parental address has the effect of permanently breaking the link with home.
Many parents seem to take it almost for granted that when a child goes to a university, that is the end of the family relationship.
No doubt each of our systems has its merits, but I am inclined to feel that, in the long run, the maintenance of family ties deserves a certain priority. Our society is strengthened by the role of the extended family here.
Where children continue as adults to live close to their parents, there are huge advantages in the rearing of their children. In these circumstances the extended family really comes into its own.
When in the 1970s I was a TD for Dublin South-East and got to know both the Ringsend/Irishtown and Pearse Street areas well, I learnt something of the closeness of family relationships there.
Because there was little opportunity to provide additional dwellings in these already built-up areas, young people seeking a corporation house or flat in which to start their married life were often faced with the need to go to some outer suburb, where they would no longer have contact with their families.
In many cases such distant housing offers were spurned, the couples continuing to live locally, each with their own family - not a very satisfactory way to start married life.
In some of the new suburbs created since then we can see the social problems that are created by taking people away from their home environment and effectively dumping them together with other uprooted families from other parts of the city.
There is, of course, no easy solution to this problem, but we should at least be conscious of just how disruptive such arrangements can be for a people as family-oriented as the Irish.