THE minor outbreak of hysteria in the middle of the election campaign following Mary Harney's dubious contribution to the debate on single mothers did not provide much cause for optimism about the imminence of a liberal society. While the intent behind the proposal that benefits be structured to encourage unmarried mothers to remain with their parents might best be described as ambiguous, the response to it was unambiguously predictable.
In a fairly typical pseudo-liberal fudge, Ms Harney was attempting to appeal to both extremes at once by presenting herself simultaneously as someone who is prepared to face the "difficult questions", while suggesting concern that the welfare system forces unmarried mothers out of home. She was trying to tap into two extremes of prejudice by invoking the safe assumption that the issue of unmarried motherhood involves nothing except the lifestyle choices of women.
Immediately, the public conversation broke down into those who believed her proposal would discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant for the money and those who thought this an unspeakable attack on "one of the weakest sections of our society".
One side believes everything can be regulated by money, the other that everything can be regulated by what is termed "compassion"
This is indeed a difficult issue, but it is not one that can be addressed by tinkering with social welfare.
In every single incidence of unmarried motherhood there is a father who, in the case of teenage pregnancy, is likely to be a teenager himself. And there is also, lest we forget, a child, who hopefully will grow up to be an adult one day.
The attitude of officialdom and the wider society to this issue is that the welfare, wishes and needs of the mother are the only matter to be considered. The rhetoric, of course, professes concern for the "best interests" of the child, but since these are invariably treated as synonymous with the interests of the mother, it amounts to the same thing.
HE father is not merely subject to exclusion at the whim of the mother, but is then treated to the odium of society on the basis that he has run away. Consideration of the welfare of the child is confined to suspect traditional notions of the needs of a baby in the early months of infancy, utterly neglectful of his or her future needs as a human being and citizen in the years of life thereafter.
The approach adopted in those early days is then set in concrete, with the result that such children grow up in circumstances which are often unnecessarily abnormal, and potentially damaging to a very high degree.
To ignore the implications of this situation is to adopt an attitude to the future of those children that can most charitably be described as amoral, and to the future shape of this society as reckless. It would appear that, rather than voice anything remotely "uncompassionate" towards unmarried mothers, we are prepared to send children out into the world with their human rights seriously compromised.
For in tolerating a culture which makes it easy for them to be deprived of their fathers, we do them untold damage and mark them apart from other children - not to mention that we devalue the concept of fatherhood in general.
Our culture in this area has been constructed to make it appear that unmarried motherhood is a form of martyrdom for women. Our desire to achieve certain ends without admitting to them is most visible in the level of cant and euphemism surrounding the area - for example, that the currently fashionable term "birth parent", used in relation to children who have been put up for adoption, actually means "birth mother". Birth fathers are never discussed, because they have no entitlement to compassion.
Our culture tells us that unmarried fathers have no interest in their children, that they wish to evade their responsibilities and leave mother and child in the lurch.
But in case the inconvenient question of the balance of rights and responsibilities might arise, the State avoids asking if they have any feelings on the matter. It simply stacks its laws against them, and then excoriates them for their wickedness.
Assertions of the fecklessness of such fathers can be followed up with vague resolutions to track them down and make them "face up to their responsibilities". This is a euphemism for writing cheques. The law of the land, incidentally, holds that a natural father has responsibility for his children, but that the discharge of such responsibilities does not entitle him to any concomitant rights.
To suggest that this is about money is an act of intellectual laziness verging on the criminal. It is a symptom of our knee jerk politics that all such issues are treated by all parties as though they were marginal matters pertaining to a few perverse individuals on the fringes of society. What is at issue here is that one in four children born in this State is born outside of marriage, ie., that this is one of the most mainstream issues of our immediate future.
IT will probably come as news to most people that, since we removed the constitutional prohibition on divorce there is now, when push comes to shove, no such thing as a legally protected family. This is what the "traditionalists" were warning us about all along, but just because they were right does not mean we should start listening to their prescriptions.
For as long as we continue to be caught up in a set of false opposites which present the alternatives as, on the one hand, "traditional family values", and on the other an emerging non-family comprising only mother and child, we will repeat and compound the injuries to children, fathers and, ultimately, society. We do, however, need to consider what our intentions arc, as a society, in this area.
The Constitution as it stands, or at least as it has been interpreted in Supreme Court judgements going back to the 1950s, affords protection only to families based on marriage. Children conceived in what might be termed premarital situations, and children of separated or divorced couples do not, it appears, fall within the scope of the relevant Articles 41 and 42.
The result is that the legal system treats children as the chattels of their mothers. If a mother desires, the apparatus of the State will move in to facilitate her in taking a child away from its father. This situation is the somewhat accidental result of our knee jerk approach to constitutional reappraisal, but our present culture of "compassion" ensures that it is not being confronted.
As I say, it all comes down to what we want. Is it our intention to produce a generation of fatherless children, raised on social welfare and denied the protection of the Constitution? I wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps the newly appointed Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform will now let us know.