Investing in families - Hypocrisy laid bare once again

THE Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development yesterday published a mammoth study on how families in 34 OECD countries shape themselves, how they work, how they cope with the world around them and how they are supported by the society they live in.

It would be easy to drown in its tsunami of detail but some findings jump from the page as they show us in a poor light. We might pretend these are unexpected or beyond our control but that would be, again, dishonest. Our support for families with children, lone parents with children and the tiny proportion of GDP we invest in families or children are rightly criticised. It shows that our great, back-of-the-lorry rhetoric about family being the cornerstone of society is not supported by the measures needed to make that declaration a reality.

We spent 2.6% of GDP on families in 2007, which was above the 2.2% OECD average. However, only 0.4% was spent on childcare services. The economic collapse of the intervening years has probably cut that tiny investment to something even less satisfactory.

The report says families with children are more likely to struggle with poverty than heretofore when pensioners were usually the least well off. This shift will probably become more pronounced unless our economy quickly grows at a rate better than predicted.

This report confirms that Ireland’s most vulnerable are condemned to a cycle of poverty and struggle by the pincer movement of dependency and childcare costs.

Low-income single parents — and their children — are being pushed deeper into poverty because of high childcare costs. In some cases this represents 40% of income so is a real barrier to a parent trying to work.

This Catch-22 bind overshadows far too many lives and is an indictment of how we educate our young people about the consequences of unintentionally becoming a parent. The reality, and no matter how supports are improved it is unlikely to change, is that if you have a child you can’t afford to support your life and the child’s will more than likely be miserable.

This issue may be more significant than it immediately appears, as a second OECD report recently showed that almost one-in-four children (23.4%) under 17 live with just one parent. Among all 34 countries Ireland is second only to America where 25% of young people live with just one parent. The OECD average is just over 15%. It is impossible not to be concerned by these figures, especially as IMF/ECB interventions might force us to reduce welfare allowances even further.

The poorest in our society are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of staggering childcare costs. For many families they are a second mortgage and very often make it uneconomic for both partners to work. These costs, unimaginable in so many other modern countries, are a real burden and will remain so until we fundamentally change the way we do things.

This report (tinyurl.com/5vfgtwa) raises myriad issues but maybe the two we most need to address are why, even when we could afford it, we did not organise our society in a way that better supports families and how a bankrupt country can implement some of the OECD recommendations — because we all know we must if we are to break the vicious circle the OECD has so vividly described.