Learned lecture lays the blame for society’s ills at single mothers’ door
It’s safe to predict high attendance, not just because Ed Walsh is a major figure in Irish public life, nor because he is president emeritus of the University of Limerick, nor even because the lecture, at 8pm, is free and open to anyone. Its content, flagged in advance, is what will ensure a substantial audience.
As this newspaper has revealed, Dr Walsh will suggest that children from lone-parent backgrounds are more likely to be involved in delinquency and crime, that some lone-parent teenagers get “preferential treatment” for housing benefits and that the absence of father figures destabilises Irish society.
Dr Walsh’s full speech may not be as reductionist as the extracts used in pre-publicity, although that does beg the question why those particular extracts were selected. But let’s just look at his proposition that the absence of father figures destabilises Irish society.
In the days of shotgun weddings, we had more father figures than we have today - true - because more guys back then felt impelled to marry the mother of their child.
We may also have had a more stable society, albeit one characterised by high emigration (including family abandonment by fathers), high suicide rates (concealed, according to overseas commentators, by officials doing PR on the statistics to help bereaved families avoid stigma), high alcoholism rates, high incarceration rates (for out of wedlock pregnancy, homosexual acts, being an orphan or having a learning disability) and the banning of great books to protect national morality.
The society of Francis McManus’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows was certainly stable. As was the society a few decades later when - as we now know - gross abuse of children lay at one end of the Irish continuum and criminal corruption of the planning process at the other.
Cradle-to-grave societal stability we had, with a serving of permanent and pensionable misery on the side.
I exaggerate, of course. Just as we assume Dr Walsh exaggerates when he opines that: “The statistics are all pointing to an association between the large number of lone parents and the social ills that we’re concerned about.”
Social ills like what, precisely? The crime rate, according to Garda statistics, is down. Drug addiction is up, or, more accurately, addiction to particular kinds of illegal drugs has gone up.
Although we’re cutting back on consumption of the biggest addictive killer, tobacco, and reducing our abuse of the second-biggest killer, alcohol, nonetheless some of our population are instead choosing hard drugs to make themselves high, sick and dead.
Hard drugs like heroin generate sickness and crime, as do ‘soft’ drugs like alcohol and nicotine. It’s just that the sickness and crime associated with hard drugs get bigger headlines, the way flesh-eating viruses get disproportionate coverage relative to more routine diseases that actually kill us in greater numbers.
The key point is that changing patterns of drug abuse do not constitute societal instability, although drug abuse of any kind is undoubtedly a social ill. But a social ill to be blamed on single mothers?
Warning about “an association between the large number of lone parents and ... social ills” is to mistake a correlation for a cause. Multiple murderers, for example, tend to have bed-wetting, fire-setting and torture of small animals in their childhood, but none of these CAUSE them to become murderers.
Similarly, lone parenthood often correlates with social ills. It works like this. Take a female teenager from a dysfunctional family who does badly in school and has neither career prospects, belief in herself nor a sense of being loved. Get her pregnant by a walkaway Joe.
The chances of the resultant baby ending up with two degrees, a BMW and a second home in Tuscany are pretty small. But the CAUSE is not lone-parenthood. The cause is poverty, failure of the system, desertion by the ‘father figure’ and reduced life choices.
On this page a couple of months ago I wrote that: “If you compare the school drop-out rate, criminality or substance abuse of children of teenage mothers with the same problems occurring in children of older mothers, you find a remarkable similarity - IF the two groups of mothers are from the same socio-economic group.
“The age at which a woman gives birth doesn’t count half as much for her children as other factors. If she’s got money and education, and if she wasn’t abused in her own childhood, a teenage mother can do just as well for her child as a twenty-something mother.”
It’s much the same for single parenthood. If it takes two to tango, it sure as hell takes two to make a single parent household, and what’s fascinating about Dr Walsh’s quoted comments is that although he laments the loss of the father figure, he doesn’t hold the lads responsible for fecking off. He doesn’t concentrate on why these apparently vital potential role-model males leave the mother holding the baby, how they can be prevented from doing so and why they see no particular link between sex and parenthood. Ah, no. His eagle eye is on the possibility that young women may be motivated to have babies to get housing grants.
Nor, despite drawing on US views, does he acknowledge the American school of thought that teenage motherhood can cause a ‘conversion to conventionality.’ Feeling responsible for a child can influence teenage mothers to be less self-destructive than the rest of their age-cohort and may encourage them to go back to school and finish their education.
Dr Walsh, in the material selected for advance release, prioritises the money issue, pointing out that €20,000 a year is available for a lone parent eligible for all benefits. In other countries, he says, these supports are subject to abuse and can be incentives for young people to become pregnant. No cause-and-effect within this country is proven.
His favoured corrective options seem to be sentencing new mothers to effective house arrest with parents they wanted to get away from, or impoverishing them to discourage single parenthood in others. Notably, neither house arrest nor impoverishment is proposed for the absent father figures.
Dr Walsh makes another intriguing observation, that it’s “very politically incorrect” to discuss lone parenting matters.
Since lone parenting is a staple of public discourse, this is patently untrue. However, it’s great self-protective advance PR. To describe oneself as ‘politically incorrect’ is to portray oneself as fearlessly maverick and paint any opposition as precious and hidebound.
It is not fearlessly maverick to suggest that crime and instability in Irish society are due to the absence of father figures and lay blame on teenage girls allegedly getting pregnant to avail of €20,000.
Nor is it ‘politically’ incorrect.
It’s straightforwardly incorrect.
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