By Colman Cassidy

Fine Gael, which is committed to providing child benefit of £25 a week for children up to the age of five, would be prepared to see that amount increased to £50 in the case of infants under 12 months, the party leader, Mr John Bruton, told a conference on children's rights in Dublin yesterday.

"My own view is that the first year of life is of enormous importance", Mr Bruton told delegates from the public service and voluntary agencies who attended the conference. "The £50 would act as an incentive so that the mother or father could be around for much of the child's first formative year."

If employers were not willing to contribute, then the State should step in to subvent families during this all-important period, Mr Bruton said.

Ms Joan Carmichael, from the ICTU, told delegates that the congress was looking for improvements in paid maternity leave as well as in paternity leave. This could result in a couple having 40 weeks' paid leave between them, apart from their annual holiday entitlement, to look after a child in its first year of life.

Dr Brian Nolan, of the ESRI, said that the issue of childcare had to be addressed separately. He was unequivocally in favour of child benefit as the best way to provide support to families. "Being universal and untaxed", he said, "it does not distort people's decisions as to whether they want to work or not."

Child benefit went to "all the family" and was not just a tax break, which could apply only to people already in the tax net. "Unlike family income supplement, it does not create poverty traps, where means-tested income can be clawed back."

He agreed with Mr Bruton that priority should be given to increase child benefit considerably "to provide the child income support we're not providing, as other countries do".

Children had to be put on the policy agenda in Ireland and provided for as citizens in their own right, Mr Robbie Gilligan, of TCD's children's research centre, told the conference. What was needed was a basic infrastructure of pre-school, arts, play and sports facilities, because the social development of children affected the "human and cultural capital" which nurtured and sustained the fabric of society.

"We need to recognise that the quality of life in our country is inextricably tied up with the quality of our children's lives", Mr Gilligan said. "But first we must be very clear about the principles and values which we want to see reflected in policies and services."

In the past, lack of money had been the excuse for non-action. "But the Celtic Tiger has exposed us. It is not that we don't have the money. It's that we lack the commitment and the vision."

We did not see children's issues as being "central to the kind of society we are or wish to become", Mr Gilligan said. Even in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, children were "remarkably invisible". As we set out to spend "more money than we know how to", children were barely on the agenda.

Structural and strategic management problems were virtually endemic in Ireland in relation to a range of social issues such as public transport planning and how to deal with refugees and asylum-seekers. "And, of course, we are incredibly slow at spotting and responding to new problems." The situation with regard to the influx of asylum-seekers was an example, as also was the problem posed by the children of minorities.

Mr Gilligan recalled that in the early 1980s, when the drug problem was "rising to its peak in Dublin", a senior civil servant in the Department of Health had told a Council of Europe conference that Ireland had no drug problem. "I don't think he was deliberately misleading his audience. It was just that the Department was so hopelessly out of touch with reality on the ground", Mr Gilligan said.

Before the proper structures could be put in place, a "philosophy" or set of values and principles to "guide practice and policy at every level" needed to be adopted, similar to the "anchor points" recommended in the discussion document on children's rights published by Fine Gael. These included:

the child has a right to the support and guardianship of both parents;

all policies directed at the family must have adequate regard for the needs and rights of children;

public policies for children must not be dominated by reactive and palliative responses;

children's needs cannot be compartmentalised to suit the structures of service providers;

children must be directly consulted in all matters affecting them.

Mr Gilligan called for a clear commitment to tackling the needs of children and, in particular, children with disabilities; those going through the courts system under the civil or criminal law; those who were in the care of the State and those from minorities.

The emphasis should be put on preventative services, in the interests of children, families and society. In the recent announcement that £21 million would be spent on refurbishing up to 200 places in special schools for young offenders, not one penny had been allocated to preventative programmes. Yet Ireland had one of highest percentages of under-21s in Europe among its prison population.

Mr Gilligan said it was "abysmal" that there was no budget in any Government department for research aimed at targeting a strategic approach to children's problems.

Families Worldwide
5278 Pinemont Dr., Suite A-180.
Salt Lake City, UT 84123 USA
Phone: USA 801/262-6878
Fax: USA 801/262-7107

Send comments and mail to Webmaster