Calls to use DNA tests to track runaway fathers

DNA testing should be used to track runaway dads who dodge financial responsibilities for their offspring, a noted academic has said.

Founding president of University of Limerick Dr Ed Walsh said such measures had proven very effective in other countries.

Conceding his views were, at times, politically incorrect, he said irrespective of “whether a community is wealthy or poor, where you have a predominance of lone parents, you have a predominance of crime”.

Dr Walsh said the results of poor parenting were evident in the current high rate of teen drinking; the rising numbers of young adults in drug treatment programmes and the increase in sexually transmitted disease.

Addressing a political forum in Limerick, he said: “The number of lone parents receiving state support has grown enormously. Many of them deserve and need it but there are incentives, such as jumping housing queues which encourage this.

“A major study of some 20,000 homes in the US shows — irrespective of whether a community is wealthy or poor — where you have a predominance of lone parents, you have a predominance of crime and the prospects of children born into single-parent homes are statistically much more difficult than for a kid fortunate enough to have been born into a two-parent home.”

Director of the One Parent Exchange Network Karen Kiernan said no Irish study has ever found any difference between the long term welfare of lone parent and two-parent households.

She pointed out that 65% of the poorest children in Ireland live in lone-parent families.

Ms Kiernan accused Dr Walsh of “engaging in a type of negative stereotyping that can cause real difficulties for children of lone parents”.