Dan Neville (Limerick West, Fine Gael)

I would like to share time with Deputies Twomey and Coveney.

I welcome the motion. The Minister said that children should be central to any public policy, and I support him wholeheartedly. However, to say that it is happening in effect is another matter. I know that the Minister's wishes are such and that he is committed to it, but there are certainly areas of extreme concern when it comes to children being central to certain policies. I will give one example that I may have raised with the Minister already.

Describing psychiatric services for children as a disgrace is mild. There is no dedicated psychiatric service for those aged 16 to 18. It is accepted by all psychiatric professionals that adult psychiatric services are totally inappropriate to children of 16 to 18 — our definition of a child is under 18. The child psychiatric service is totally underfunded and because children aged 14 to 16 tend to have a great many problems, it concentrates on that group. Younger children are ignored and the effect is that one is really not tackling their problems. The psychiatric services are surely just one example of children not being central to a policy. I recently attended an international conference where the fact was raised that we do not have such services for children aged 16 to 18. In our area, we have seen children as young as 11 with adult psychiatric patients, which is totally inappropriate and unacceptable.

With regard to the motion, Ireland has changed over the past decade and a half. We have seen many changes in the economic and employment area. They have all been very welcome and have shown a level of success. However, they have caused social and cultural changes that have had as much effect on the population as the economic development itself. We have not dealt with those as effectively, or paid the same attention to them, as we did with economic and employment developments. We have not examined the cultural and social changes that have arisen because of economic development. The quality of life has not kept pace with the standard of living. Many families find themselves under pressure. Housing issues were raised. Any couple wishing to own a home has had no choice for the past decade but for parents, father and mother, to be in employment. While occasionally people are able to be house husbands or housewives, that is extremely rare because of the economic pressures of economic development. We have not dealt with that.

Many families now have two parents at work and must seek to juggle the needs of their children with the demands of their career and education. Some parents have child and elder care responsibilities. Recently we discussed the elderly in this House. It is not unusual for a family to concern themselves with their parents and children while both parents are in employment. Modern pressures are of great significance in the area. Time is a new pressure. More families' time is spent working, but there is less direct support through extended family networks, with which I will deal later. It is often harder on those lower down the income scale and those caring alone.

The traditional pattern of the family with a male wage earner and a female dependant at home caring for the children is no longer the norm. An OECD study shows that women's employment in Ireland is at the EU average of 56%, an increase of 140% since 1971. Women's participation in the labour force is expected to grow by a further 218,000 by the year 2011. The number of parents raising their children alone has risen, a new phenomenon in Irish society. Employment rates among lone parents are low, and lone parent families are disproportionately at risk of poverty. Child care and other supports are necessary to allow them to access work, training and education where needed to support their families. A major initiative is required to allow young single parents in particular — mothers in most cases — to access education so that they might be allowed the life opportunities they deserve. Being a mother should not inhibit a person from furthering her education.

The last Estimates withdrew the crèche supplement, a vital payment to families on low incomes that helped people get out of the poverty trap by enabling parents to work. For other families on the average industrial wage, there is a need for both parents to work to pay the mortgage or provide for the family's medical bills. For many, there is no element of choice about whether one parent works or stays at home to care for children. The growing pressures facing families have been ignored. Rapid development has heaped a disproportionate burden on young families, especially young mothers. Work-life balance has become an issue because of wide-ranging economic and social changes. In recent decades, the supports of extended families and communities have been weakened, another substantial change in Irish society. Previous generations had support from their extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, in-laws and first cousins, but the new nuclear family where people move in modern society dictates that people are alone, without such support systems. That is a key change affecting many young people, for example, through the loss of assistance with child minding, which was previously available through the extended family.

Parents at work need more flexibility to deal with longer-term child care and emergencies for their children during the day. Employers must remember that they are employing members of families rather than just productive units. Having previously been involved in personnel, I abhor the new term that came in ten or 15 years ago, "human resources". People are regarded by most employers as human resources, but there is more to them than that. They are families, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and so on. There is a great deal more to a human than just the resource value. If families are dislocated, the firm will not be immune to the effects. Employers must accept responsibility for that, as must the State. Labour law should be reviewed to recognise the changes needed to accommodate a situation where both parents are at work and sharing the obligations of parenting. Employers should be incentivised to assist the development of family-friendly work practices.

I spoke of lone parents, and it is important that we recognise the child's right to know and be parented by both parents — we have stated that on numerous occasions. I approach this not from the point of view of the rights of fathers or mothers, but from those of the child. We have not studied, and do not fully understand, the implications of changes in society where one third of children are born to single mothers. We do not know how many of those are reared in one-parent families since the statistics on partnerships do not exist. However, the vast majority of those are reared by one-parent families. We must change our culture to demand that a child has the right to parenting from both parents. There is an obligation on both to do so and both have a right to such involvement.

Increasing the provision of adequate child care means more than encouraging women back to the workforce and allowing them to stay there.

See this speech in context