Still failing to put our children first

LEAVING aside all the moralising on broken homes leading to yob culture, as evidenced in the rioting and looting in England last week, there are as just as many damaged children who come from “respectable stable marriages” as from one active parent families.

We need to find a new term for families where only the mother is involved in active parenting because there is no such thing as a single mother in the sense that every child has a father. Even if the child was born via an unconventional method, somewhere along the way a man was involved. If the parents are not in a relationship together this does not justify the father being allowed to simply walk away from their financial responsibility to provide for their children, even if they are not capable of providing for their child’s needs.

The biological father should be named on every single birth certificate and they should be automatically financially liable to support their child with an amount of at least 20% of their net income, be it from benefits or employment being paid toward the upkeep of their child with the benefit paid in vouchers that can only purchase items for the child.

In this day and age, there is no excuse for people having unplanned pregnancies or for having children until they are both emotionally and financially mature enough to support those children by themselves without being dependent on state support. When it comes to money, it’s not a question of there not being enough money, it’s a question of priorities and if the Government still thinks, for example, a Tralee bypass is more important than maintaining smaller class sizes, that just shows how dysfunctional the Irish attitude toward childhood still is. Despite all the horrors that have revealed about what we did to our children, we still refuse to change and those toddlers now being affected by cutbacks are likely to become teenagers with no hope for their future. That’s when Ireland will have its own riots, having learned nothing and changed nothing.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf

London