Change of direction needed to avoid failing children

I am voting in favour of the children’s rights referendum.

However, the initiative cannot disguise the hypocrisy of a Government that has put children on the frontlines of an ideological attack on ordinary people commending the proposal to the country.

Fine Gael and Labour have unrelentingly implemented an agenda of austerity that has made even the IMF shudder at times. As a result, we now have a struggling education system, a collapsing health service, and increasingly marginalised voluntary and community sector. All of these provide vital pillars of a healthy and stable childhood.

We have seen cuts to child benefit and cuts to back to school allowance, while the cost of doing so continues to rapidly rise.

In 2009, before this Government came to power and peddled austerity under the fallacious cloak of fiscal and political reform, we had approximately 96,000 children living in poverty in this country.

In April 2011 it was reported by the End Child Poverty Coalition that one in 11 Irish children were living in consistency poverty.

The group also stated that they expected that proportion to rise. Their analysis of the situation at the time is a damning indictment of Fianna Fáil’s legacy. Their projections for the future signalled a clear lack of confidence that the approach being followed by the current administration would alleviate the conditions that perpetuate child poverty.

It is easy to see why the increase was expected when most anti-child poverty organisations consistently highlight that the problem is exacerbated due to factors such as exclusion from education, healthcare, social networks quality & affordable housing, along with insufficient levels of household income.

As childhood is an evolution of sorts and holds an implied expectation of a progression to another status, we must also protect the foundations of that transitional next step.

These foundations are opportunities for higher education, training and quality employment opportunities commensurate with qualifications.

You cannot seriously expect the economic and social dynamics of childhood to end if society doesn’t provide adequate opportunity for advancement.

If you take these factors and hold them up against the dynamics of the neoliberal model that this Government has chosen to implement, the prospects of lifting these children out poverty are very bleak indeed.

The basis of the Government’s economic strategy has been to reduce spending on social infrastructure, an act that has devastated services upon which children rely. The second edge has been that the approach promotes negligible interest in fostering growth.

A real commitment to employment stimulus is virtually non-existent. The approach does nothing to reduce social exclusion factors or the family income issues and knock-on effects.

The proposals in the referendum are meaningful and it is right that they are being broadly welcomed, especially the aspects that relate to children in crisis.

The issue today is that children are experiencing deprivation in situations that would not be traditionally categorised as cases of crisis.

We have a considerable demographic in Ireland that has accumulated all the cosmetic trappings of prosperity but now struggle to put dinner on the table and to pay utility bills.

The term ‘cornflakes days’ is rapidly becoming a regular utterance within the vocabulary of the children of the ‘new poor.’

Rights, as they form the principles for the functioning of a society, are supposed to be constant.

They have transcendental characteristic and they should not be changeable depending on economic circumstances.

The first right of a child should be the inalienable right to live a childhood free of poverty.

We must force this coalition to dismantle their austerity programme, the effects of which will adversely impact young people for decades, and adopt an approach in which the rights of children are protected in the day-to-day decisions of government.

I fear that we as a nation will continue to fail our children if we do not demand a change of direction.

Darren O’Keeffe

Model Farm Road

Cork