Childhood spoiled by politically correct do-gooders? I don’t think so

NOW, Terry Prone is never wrong. Hardly ever. Well, only occasionally.

I lie awake on Sunday nights sometimes, wondering what she’s going to be writing about on Monday in the Irish Examiner (and terrified she’s already covered something I’m writing about for Tuesday). Sometimes she writes for sheer fun, sometimes she uses humour to make a serious point. There’s nobody writing today though that has a better facility for catching the imagination.

Some of you, I suspect, don’t know Terry as well as I do. Well, let me let you into a secret. She’s not just a great writer, she’s a great adviser as well. More than once she’s rescued me from making a bit of a dope of myself, and she’s always hugely generous with her time. And honest — she gives it to you straight between the eyes. You don’t just enjoy her company and her writing, you take it seriously as well.

So when Terry gets it completely wrong, I’m torn. She’s so good at what she does, I don’t get too many chances to correct her, and it’s great when I can. But I only have a day, from Monday to Tuesday, to set her to rights. She has the rest of the week to decide whether she’ll fillet me next Monday, or maybe let me off with a warning.

So, taking my courage in my hands, I have to say that Terry couldn’t have been more wrong than in her column yesterday. The basic argument she put forward was that an over-regulated world, peopled by politically correct bureaucrats, was spoiling childhood. As she said, you could easily come to the conclusion that “we have turned childhood into a bureaucratic, overscheduled, overprotected state, policed by parents in SUVs”.

And to make matters worse, this is an area where that old bugbear, political correctness, has once again gone mad. What else could account for the behaviour of Newcastle city council, as described by Terry and reported in some of the more lurid newspapers over the last couple of weeks?

In Terry’s account, they recently “spent a fortune putting lads up in cherry-pickers to strip all the chestnut trees in the area of nuts lest children, eager to play conkers, climb those trees and put themselves in danger of falling”. Well, not quite. Actually, they used some of their existing equipment to strip a few trees that were particularly dangerous and where adventurous kids would be putting themselves at obvious risk. They’re actually a bit peed-off in Newcastle at being lampooned for this quite sensible decision. It seems the media is over-egging the political correctness pudding, while ignoring something the parks department in Newcastle is really concerned about — a disease that is attacking the chestnut trees and doing considerable damage to the fruit. A conker canker, of all things.

But back to the point, and time to get serious. Over-regulated? Bureaucratic? Overprotected? Let me give you a few examples. Five years ago, we passed a child protection law in Ireland. It was called the Children’s Act 2001, and it was designed to ensure that a lot of issues around children were indeed more fully regulated. One of the things it was intended to change was the age of criminal responsibility, which up to 2001 was seven. It was decided by the Dáil in 2001 to change that to 12.

But ‘the system’ only got around to that last week. The age of criminal responsibility is now 12 for most crimes, but 10 for some serious ones. That’s five years after passing the original act.

There are other measures in that act which are designed to ensure children are more fully protected. Some of them cost money and require some additional staff or expertise.

Not one of those measures has been implemented yet because the resources haven’t been put in on the ground to enable it to happen.

There’s a well-known statistic in Ireland, almost a cliché at this stage, that we’ve got more golf courses than play grounds for kids. And why is that? Well, there’s all sorts of issues around insurance and management and proper sites and keeping the playground safe at night. Anyway, what’s wrong with lots of golf courses? And as a result, there are lots of kids who not only have no conker trees to climb, but nowhere at all to play.

And they live, often enough, in neighbourhoods that are very dangerous places for kids to be.

AT least they’re not hungry. Oh no? The official statistics — the official ones — admit that one in every 10 children in Ireland lives in consistent poverty. Consistent poverty means hunger, cold and damp. It means inadequate clothing, nowhere decent to do homework, no likelihood of childhood ailments being treated by a quick trip to the doctor in mum’s SUV.

Poverty like that is somebody’s fault, especially in a rich country like this one. It may even sometimes be the parents’ fault. It’s hardly ever the fault of the kids.

Neither is the fact that day in and day out some kids are put at risk for want of some basic resources.

I’m sure nobody would regard it as over-bureaucratic, given all the experience we’ve had in the past, to want to ensure that everyone who works closely with children had been through some form of vetting. In fact it’s sad, but true, that vetting is essential nowadays. It just isn’t available. It remains far too easy for someone with evil intent, even with a criminal track record, to put themselves in a position where they can abuse children in their care. That risk exists not because the gardaí don’t care — they do. But there are still not enough of them to do the vetting job properly.

In our rich and overprotected country, the women’s refuges remain full. In the last 10 years more than 50 women have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners.

Nearly 10,000 times a year the gardaí are called to scenes involving domestic violence. One in eight women experience abuse while they are pregnant. Nearly one in five women have reported abuse by their partners in surveys. There is no ‘type’ of woman to whom violence occurs, and there is no ‘type’ of home in which it happens. It happens everywhere, all the time. And children were present in, and traumatised by, a significant number of all those incidents.

I could go on, and on and on. The truth is that we’re in transition in Ireland. It’s not that long ago since we were a country where children were supposed to be seen and not heard.

And we were a country where it was easy to brutalise children, to victimise and abuse them. My generation accepted pretty brutal corporal punishment as the norm. This generation, quite rightly, doesn’t.

In some ways that don’t really matter, we may be politically correct and silly. But the children of the nation still don’t have the right to be cherished equally. Far from being an overprotected state, we remain a country that overlooks children and childhood far too often. Let’s change that fundamental fact, and then get back to dealing with the conker trees.