Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The purpose of this Commencement matter is to ask the Minister to outline the specific initiatives the Government plans to implement to promote and support married families and the objective of addressing child poverty. I was prompted by comments made by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs at the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child where he said that children who grow up in households where parents are effectively precluded from paid work will struggle to be included in mainstream society in any meaningful way. We know that household joblessness can lead to the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next. Good social policy and a strong expression of children's rights give every child the opportunity to realise their full potential. Obviously, we know from our own experience, as politicians, and from all the studies carried out that lone parents - often the mother who struggles and makes a lifetime of sacrifices to rear the child, often without any support from the father - have more challenging, economic and social issues during their life because of that experience.

I am also prompted by the Minister's comments with regard to reducing the waiting time for a couple seeking divorce to be reduced. This does not fit well with other comments the Minister has made with regard to the importance placed on marriage. I think the position is that a couple must be living apart for four out of the last five years. In this regard, there is a necessity to underpin marriage.To some extent it is surprising that two people, a man and a woman, might come together when young, fall in love, get married and spend their lives together. It is a bit of a phenomenon in its own way. It is a bedrock to society when this happens. In the Western world there has been an increasing propensity for separation and divorce but in this country only approximately 250,000 people are separated or divorced. The Minister might correct me if I am wrong. We have not had the level of divorce and separation that we have seen in other countries and we should try to preserve that level.

The studies I mentioned are very interesting and I presume the Minister or her officials will examine them. I just picked the one from Pennsylvania State University, whose scholars began the inquiry conscious of decades of research, producing evidence that parental divorce is negatively associated with offspring outcomes from early childhood through adolescence and into adult years. It indicates that children who experience parental divorce before age seven, for example, manifest significantly more behavioural problems at age 11. It is a good and balanced report. The report of the Swedish university is quite interesting as it is research from a number of years back. It indicates that during the 20th century, divorce rates have increased substantially in most cities in the Western world and it has been demonstrated that parental divorce is associated with several negative outcomes in children. The research has demonstrated that children who experienced parental divorce generally reported lower psychological well-being than children from intact families. The report also demonstrates that a cohort of women in their mid 50s coming from families of divorced or separated parents experienced greater challenges in that area when compared with those who came from intact families. One finding illustrates that contrary to expectation, data do not show that the association between parental divorce in childhood and psychological problems in adulthood diminish significantly over time. Particularly in the challenging times in which we live, society as a whole needs to try to underpin the importance of initiatives to preserve, support and incentivise this bedrock of society.