A man runs wildly down Henry Street, his drug glazed eyes, his open shirt and the wailing infant in his arms betraying in an instant a multi generational tragedy of suffering and abuse. When a female passerby stops and stares with concern, the tells her where to go. In Grafton Street, a dirty four year old girl runs into a shop and grabs a pretty container of colourful soap. She shouts as the security guard forces her back out on to the street.
On O'Connell Street, a sickly, skinny mother pushes her crying young baby in its buggy through the crowd. She stops and slaps the child hard, shouting "that'll shut you up". Nobody does anything.
These are the sort of scenes which anyone with their eyes open will see on a normal day in Dublin - or any other part of Ireland, for that matter.
These are the ugly flashpoints of a deeper, unseen problem - a world of children who daily suffer neglect, "malnourishment and abuse, often at the hands of young drug addict parents, many who have themselves been abused as children and who have been using drugs for so long that their emotional and moral development is grossly stunted.
Roisin Shortall, Labour TD in Dublin North West and chairman of the Eastern Health Board, fears for Dublin - for this country - as these neglected and abused babies inevitably grow up to be troubled teenagers.
She thinks we have to face the fact that social welfare policy is encouraging young, lone parents who lack stable relationships and stable personalities to have babies by rewarding them with financial, housing and other benefits, while at the same time financially penalising two parent families, whether married or co habiting.
Ms Shortall is only too aware that by daring to risk political incorrectness and look this problem in the face, she runs the risk of being labelled "right wing". "Preserving the family is traditionally the preserve of the Right. It is time for the Left to embrace the family. As left wing politicians it is our responsibility to ensure that children are born into situations where they are wanted and where both parents are in the position to provide the care they need," says Ms Shortall. "Lone parents can do very well and be good parents. But we also have to recognise that the ideal family arrangement for children is a two parent family and the State must recognise that, where children are concerned, we should be encouraging parents to live in a unit," she adds.
"I'm not saying lone parenthood itself is to blame for social problems or that all lone parents have problem children, but lone parenthood is very much endemic to the kind of ghettos which give rise to all the many social problems such as drug abuse and child neglect and alcohol abuse."
Poverty, school drop out rates and lone parenthood go hand in hand. In Ballymun, one of the most deprived areas of the country, 70 per cent of babies are born outside marriage. Ballymun is part of Area 7 of the Eastern Health Board, which includes the north city from the airport to Ballymun and inwards to Fairview and, the north inner city. Area 7 has the highest pro portion of non marital births in the entire EHB: 42 per cent. In the Eastern Health Board area, on average one in four babies (26 per cent) is born outside marriage.
The average proportion of non marital births for the country is 19.7 per cent, compared to an EU average of 21.7 per cent. Just below the national rate at between 18 and 19 per cent is the relatively well off Eastern Health Board Area 1 district (Blackrock, Foxrock, Dun Laoghaire, Killiney and Shankill) and the upwardly mobile Area 9 (Co Kildare). These rates would include, of course, parents in stable cohabiting relationships, women whose partners have died and women who have left abusive relationships after the birth of their children.
"From my experience in working in the constituency and dealing with people in my clinics I am very conscious that there is a growing trend towards lone parenthood, and often there is no man on the scene - and a lot of women struck me as preferring it that way, Ms Shortall, says. These women have many difficulties in their own lives. They have difficulty coping and I worry how much more difficult it will be when their children become teenagers."
Already, such children are making the headlines through their anti social behaviour. The EHB is to open six new centres soon for behaviourally disturbed children up to the age of 10.
Such disturbed children - the teenagers of tomorrow - are suffering from malnutrition, abuse and neglect, often as a result of their parents' drug and alcohol abuse. The Eastern Health Board's 1995 report says that while sexual abuse may have attracted the greatest attention, the effects of abuse by neglect are "silent and pernicious". Some professionals speak of "neglect of neglect" in both public and professional milieux.
Of the 2,158 cases of suspected abuse in the EHB in 1995, 675 were cases of "neglect", the majority in Areas 3. 4 and 7 (encompassing Tallaght, Crumlin, Ballymun and the north and south inner cities). The EHB report says that mothers of "failure to thrive infants" tend to deal with their problems by ignoring them. The babies look "starved, withdrawn, lethargic in movements, apathetic, depressed looking, detached and irritable". They are developmentally delayed in motor, language and social skills.
Ms Shortall says: "Those working at the coalface such as teachers and social workers report on the growing incidence of child neglect, child malnutrition, serious underachievement at school and difficulty in getting a child to school on time or to attend school regularly. There are serious problems with discipline and the absolute lack of any kind of innate moral code.
"There are children up late at night watching entirely unsuitable videos and unable to get up for school in the morning. They spend so much time watching television that teachers cannot get their attention in school.
"Many need speech therapy because they have not had the interaction with other people, particularly adults, which they need. So many children need help that there are now long waiting lists for child guidance clinics.
"There are very compelling social and environmental grounds for fearing how these children are going to turn out as adults and my fear is that we are storing up huge problems for the future," she concludes.
To allay this deterioration and restore solid family values, social welfare policy should practise positive discrimination in favour of those who stay in school; stay off drugs; get career training, get, jobs, and have children within marriage or at least stable two parent relationships," she believes. At present the opposite is the case.
There is "an incentive in the system for people not to get married," Ms Shortall says. A report commissioned by the Joint Oireachtas Committee, on the Family, of which Ms Shortall is a member, found that lone parents stand to lose 30-40 per cent of their income if they choose to marry or live with their child's other parent.
The report, by finance journalist Colm Rapple, found that with one adult working on an income of £12,000, a couple living apart is 40 per cent (£80) a week better off. If both parents are on social welfare, the couple living apart is 23 per cent (£27.50) a week better off. When they are earning a combined income of £16,000, the couple living apart is more than 30 per cent (£87) better off than if they were living together. And often in this scenario, a married couple is even worse off than a couple cohabiting.
"Parents of children at the lower end of the earnings spectrum are being actively discouraged from either living together or getting married with all the knock on consequences of family life and parenting. Despite our rhetoric about families and their traditional role in our society, our tax and social welfare systems are penalising the basic two parent unit," Ms Shortall believes.
"Anybody in that sit oat ion knows they would be crazy to get married or live together because they would lose out substantially."
There is also a major disincentive for unmarried parents to cohabit. A working lone father living with his partner and child will receive the single person's tax free allowance. But if he lives apart, from his partner and child, he will receive not only the TEA, but also the single parent's tax free allowance if he shares responsibility for the child, making him clearly better off by living apart from his child.
Instead, the State should, be encouraging parents to cohabit in a stable relationship or to marry by giving them financial rewards to do so and to help them set up homes.
Added to the present financial discouragement to cohabit or marry, is the lack of belief which many lone mothers have in the two parent family, a feeling which comes through strongly in Lone Mothers in Ireland, a study for the Combat Poverty Agency by Anthony McCashin, lecturer in the Department of Social Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
Many of the mothers he profiled said that having a child brings them "independence" by allowing them to leave the family home and have their own income. Many lone mothers feel marriage is unattractive and that they are better off without partners because managing alone, they "feel, more confident" and can control their own finances.
Many an unmarried mother feels she is better off being poor and in control, than she would be if cohabiting with or married to a man who controlled the finances and thus had her at his mercy.
As Ms Shortall puts it, a young girl who, has grown up in a dysfunctional family where her possibly drug addicted father abused her and where her older brothers, also drug addicts, abused her too, may see lone parenthood as an escape route. And it may be her only escape route, considering that she us likely to have left school at 15 and to have low expectations of her own ability to get a job.
Mr McCashin's research, as well as research internationally, has shown that pregnancy, in such cases, often lust "happens" without the mother ever thinking self critically about her motivations. The pattern may seem clear only to outsiders looking in and it would be wrong to say that the young woman deliberately got pregnant to get the lone parent's allowance.
Mr McCashin's look at 23 unmarried mothers found that only two (aged 19 and 21) intentionally became pregnant. Three others "wanted" to have a baby and were "pleased" to learn they were pregnant.
Said one: "I was living in Ballymun at the time and just went in and had the test. Positive, I was with a bloke my parents despised and hated. I was delighted with myself. He was delighted."
When asked about contraception, she replied: "I came to your man so tight I
didn't care whether I got pregnant or not. That was my excuse for it. I was madly in love, totally blind."
Six of the women had been attempting to avoid pregnancy, but had been either making mistakes with the Billings (or natural family planning) method or forgot to use it on at least one occasion. These women were shocked and surprised to hear they were pregnant.
A fourth group of women professed ignorance about contraception and had been "too embarrassed" to find out.
Ms Shortall believes we must take every means possible to encourage such young women - and the potential fathers of their children - to stay in school, even if that means paying them to do so. She has always argued in favour of a basic income (which would bean that additional income from employment would be highly taxed) to all people regardless of circumstances, so that young single women without babies would be just as well off as those who have them.
In her work in Ballymun, Ms Shortall has observed that pregnancy is often a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, a rite which would have to be replaced with other experiences and achievements. As Ms Shortall envisages it, the education system should be developed to help young people to form strong moral centres which would help them to make the right decisions.
Young men too need this encouragement. As she sees it, too many are finding themselves to be regarded as useless by everyone, forced completely out of the picture both in terms of employment and as parents, as increasing numbers of young lone mothers reject the fathers of their children.
Such young men need training, jobs and a moral grounding to enable them to see themselves as responsible, married fathers in the future.
Instead, the opposite is the case. Currently, young people in disadvantaged areas who "against all the odds" remain in school, become trained and get a job, see that their lone parent school drop out friends are better off.
Recently, Ms Shortall had an "unusual" case in her clinic: a 19 year old woman who had done her Leaving Cert, trained in a career and managed to get a job. The woman was unusual in that she was unmarried and didn't have a baby. She wanted to remain living in Ballymun, but there are no private flats to rent there. She wanted public housing accommodation but without a baby, she could not get it. Instead of being rewarded for her choices and her perseverance, she is being punished. Her case, in Ms Shortall's view, encapsulated everything that is wrong about our social welfare system which encourages the wrong choices, and penalises the right ones.