Let’s marry one good idea to the budget and save us all a fortune
Brian Crowe is an ordained Minister of the Church of Ireland, and a policy researcher for the Ulster Unionist Party in Stormont. And in what may well be a first for the Unionist Party, he accepted an invitation to speak to a group of Catholic priests gathered in Lismullin Conference Centre, near Navan, last Monday night.
Crowe, who was speaking in a personal capacity, drew on Catholic and Protestant sources to show how the State "has no responsibility to make theological or confessional judgements" and that any arguments made by the churches on social policy should be based on notions of "the common good."
And Christian ideas about the common good, he argued, start with the family based on marriage. His message is very relevant as we approach budget day. A number of years ago, Charlie McCreevy launched a tax individualisation policy which put families where one spouse was working at a relative disadvantage to families with two spouses working.
Apart from the economic side-effects of this, the affair revealed that the Government and its policymakers have a poor understanding of the role of marriage and the family in providing for the welfare and happiness of children.
But tax individualisation isn't the only problem. The Government is bereft of a strategy to deal with the problem of increasing numbers of children being born into single parent families families which, with many very heroic exceptions, find it difficult to provide the same stability for children that a pair of married parents can give.
If the Government thinks long-term planning begins and ends with a national pension fund it should read 'Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family,' compiled by the British research institute, Civitas.
The report finds that, in Britain, children living without their biological fathers are more likely to live in poverty and deprivation, to have more trouble in school and more difficulty in getting on with others.
They also face a higher risk of health problems, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, and are more likely to run away from home. Their teenage brothers and sisters are more likely to play truant from school, to leave it at 16 or to be expelled, to take drugs, to break the law and to become teenage parents. Young adults not living with their biological fathers are less likely to attain qualifications and more likely to be unemployed, to suffer long-term emotional and psychological problems and to experience homelessness.
The list of problems is actually much longer than this. And it can't, I'm afraid, be dismissed as just a British problem. Over the last couple of decades, the number of children born outside of marriage in Ireland has risen dramatically, to a present figure of 31% of total births, and there is increased single parenthood as a result of marriage breakdown. Is all this to blame for teenage drinking and drug-taking, early school leaving, violence and other indicators of unhappiness in many young people's lives? Undoubtedly, our culture of binge-drinking and on-screen violence is playing a major role. But weak family structures leave young people more vulnerable to these influences.
Liberal commentators are quick to condemn any link between social problems and single parenthood. They point out that many single-parent families are doing an admirable job, while many traditionally-structured families are abusive and negligent. That, of course, is perfectly true. But it makes no sense to compare the best of the worst with the worst of the best. What policymakers must examine is which family arrangement is most likely to produce happy, well-adjusted children and productive members of society.
And then they should promote that model. It's called marriage. Those who argue that cohabitation is just as good, as long as the biological parents are both present to nurture the children, need to re-examine the evidence. Civitas found that less than 4% of cohabitations in Britain last for ten years or more and, surprisingly, cohabitations with children are more likely to break up than childless ones.
Cohabiting couples accumulate less wealth than married couples. Married men in Britain earn 10%40% more than single or cohabiting men, and they are more successful in their careers, particularly when they become fathers.
Of course, all women who take time out of employment to have children lose some earning power, whether they are married or not. But cohabiting and lone mothers often lack access to the father's income, making it more difficult to balance their caring responsibilities with their careers.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding by Civitas is that cohabitees are more likely than married people to suffer from depression, and women who cohabit are more likely than wives to be abused.
The question for our policymakers is: are we willing to face these facts and take evasive action? Or do arguments in favour of marriage and the family have a whiff of conservative Catholicism about them which politicians and sociologists find too hard to stomach? If so, we may be cutting off our nose to spite our face. Brian Crowe's argument is that a traditional-style emphasis on marriage and the family should not be seen as theologically-based, but simply as an instrument to serve the common good. This is the viewpoint adopted by some policymakers in the US, where divorce and family breakdown has caused so much damage that the state of Oklahoma now requires its social workers, nurses and public sector staff to give all people coming to them for help, including never-married and divorced mothers, at-risk teenagers or cohabiting students, the explicit message that marriage is the best protection against abuse, poverty and disease. Other states are following suit. Louisiana and Arizona have introduced 'covenant marriage,' a nuptial contract which makes it harder to divorce, while Texas and South Carolina are offering cut-price marriage licences if couples have pre-marital counselling.
"We aren't moralising or telling people how to live their lives, but changing the incentives," says Jerry Regier, director of the governor's Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. "The key is to encourage marriage for the good of society while not denigrating other lifestyles. If people make certain choices because of bad government policy and then government has to pick up the pieces and pay for those choices, then it's very much government's business."
Perhaps this economic argument will appeal to the Government more than anything else. But something more than economics is needed.
Fr Joe Mullan, director of Accord (Dublin), the Catholic Church agency for marriage, is grateful for the 500,000 it received from the Government this year and contrasts that with the zero funding which the organisation received prior to 1997. "But it is ironic that the courts often refer couples to us for counselling," he adds, "yet the State doesn't require or encourage couples to take pre-marriage courses." If a renewed emphasis on marriage and family life can save needless misery in the future, it has to be worth a try. And the Government should start with next week's budget.
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