Cherish all the children

Fintan O'Toole
18/01/2005

One of the most eloquent moments at the funeral Mass for Robert Holohan was when the great Cork hurler, Se?n ?g ? hAilp?n, read one of the Prayers of the Faithful: "we pray that we work for a society where children will enjoy the freedom and the safety to be children".

It summed up perhaps the most basic aspiration of a civilised society. Freedom and safety, and the balance between them, are the elements that all parents try to juggle for their children. Whatever our political or religious beliefs, Se?n ?g ? hAilp?n's prayer is one that most of us mutter, silently or aloud.

That most of us value the idea of childhood was evident from the way the people of Midleton responded to Robert's death. The huge search parties that turned out day after day in inclement weather, the spontaneous suspension of the commercial life of the town on its busiest day of the week, the dignified feeling of collective grief - these things all pointed to a genuine belief that a lost child is everybody's child. Yet the acceptance that a society where children have the freedom and safety to be children is still an aspiration to be prayed for continues to mock that decent instinct.

Prayer, hope and anxiety will always be a part of parenthood. Even in the best-run society, there will always be incidents and accidents. Children will fall. They will be run over. They will be struck down by fatal illnesses. They will have the awful luck to be born to parents who can't or won't mind them. They will fall into the hands of people who want to abuse and exploit them. Societies can afford protection from some but not all of these contingencies. The act that every parent dreads most - that of burying the child you thought would bury you - will persist.

But there is an awful lot that we can protect our children from. If we want it enough, we can have, in the very near future, a society that acts on the impulse that was so evident in Midleton last week - a society in which a child in trouble is everybody's child. Tomorrow, the children's charity Barnardos (to declare an interest, I am a member of its board) will launch a strategy aimed at fulfilling by 2016 the promise of the 1916 Proclamation to "cherish all the children of the nation equally". The ambition it sets out is to make Ireland the best place in the world to be a child. It is a simple but immense goal that everyone in Ireland can support, not least because it is actually attainable.

Children's life chances are shaped by circumstances they cannot control. They are shaped, not by the choices they make, but by the choices they are given. Irish society should be especially conscious of this truth. We have both the motive and the opportunity. The motive is that with over a million children in the Republic, representing almost 30 per cent of the population, Ireland has the highest proportion of children within the EU. We also have, at 43 per cent, the highest percentage in the EU of households with children. The opportunity is that we have, collectively speaking, far more adults to look after these children than we had before. In the 1980s, for every Irish child, there was one paid worker. By 2016, there will be two. This gives us the collective resources to answer, in so far as any society can, Se?n ?g ? hAilp?n's prayer.

Yet, after 15 years of economic growth, we still have gross failures. There are 66,000 children living in consistent poverty and 237,000 living in relative income poverty. About 1,000 children a year don't even make it to second-level schools. (Nobody actually knows the precise number - itself a mark of scandalous neglect.) One child in 10 leaves school with severe literacy problems. Fifteen per cent leave without a Leaving Certificate, and 3 per cent with no qualifications at all.

Around 1,500 children are homeless - half of them are under five years of age. There are 3,000 Travellers living on the roadside with no access to running water or electricity. Around 50,000 children are living in inadequate housing. The effective removal of tens of thousands of medical cards has left huge numbers of children with no GP service access.

It is not Utopian to believe that real progress on these issues can be made very quickly. In theory, the Government knows this very well. Three times in recent years it has committed itself to the elimination of consistent poverty for Irish children by 2007: in the National Children's Strategy, in the National Anti-Poverty Strategy, and in Sustaining Progress. It obviously knows that this very modest goal can be attained. Yet, as things stand, there is little to suggest that it will be achieved over the next two years. Last December's Budget provided further evidence of a lack of urgency about children's rights. Childcare was virtually ignored. The long-standing promise to raise child benefit to ?150 in 2002 terms was again broken.

Child Dependant Allowance, which is targeted at families living on social welfare, was frozen for the tenth year running. Why? Because children can't vote. The grief at Robert Holohan's death should remind us of our obligation to vote for them.

? The Irish Times