A SENIOR politician in a Government party recently remarked that even bankers and their ilk want measures to improve the prospects of people living in areas which seem increasingly split off from the rest of society.
The rationale for this altruism is, according to the politician, that otherwise they will one day end up being victims of violence as those who have no stake in society turn on those who have.
If the fear of this dramatic scenario is at work in the present election there is little sign of it. Apart from Mary Harney's single mothers, the issue of poverty has hardly been mentioned.
One reason for this, of course, may be the very phenomenon which animated the politician in question: those who live in the most deprived areas of our cities and towns don't vote in any significant numbers. Energy invested in seeking the middle class vote is far more likely to give a return.
Yet this very silence is as good an indication as any of the superficiality of election campaigns. We appear to have become accepting of a situation in which large segments of the population don't avail of the educational opportunities which are their children's only hope for the future, don't vote, are condemned to a lifetime of hard financial circumstances and have to organise marches and evictions to get the State to take an interest in what the heroin epidemic is doing to their communities.
The unmarried mothers, though, can still get our attention. Mary Harney's call for unmarried mothers to be encouraged to stay at home with their families may or may not have emanated from a feeling of concern for their plight but it caught the public imagination and the topic ran for days on the radio chat shows.
Whether it will ever be heard of again after the election is another matter. Constitutionally, it is hard to see how rent allowances can be denied to unmarried mothers but given to other single mothers such as widows, separated women and divorcees. Equally it is hard to believe that any new administration is going to turn around and give extra money to unmarried mothers to encourage them to stay at home with their parents.
The most curious thing about this debate is that it appears to be about money and not about children. What needs to be done to provide a positive environment for these children to grow up in? Whether their mothers do, or do not, live with their parents, what do we have in terms of family resource centres, advice services, day care facilities and so on to give these children a reasonable chance in life?
On average, a child is at greater risk than anyone else of living in poverty. These children will, as we all know, grow up with frightening rapidity into a world which has little to offer them but which, nevertheless, demands that they live by its rules and regulations.
We will, of course, send social workers to look into the matter if they are abused. But we will not send social workers to ensure that their families function in such a way that their children are not abused. Nor will we create the network of services to support these families - and much of that work could be done by volunteers or at a modest cost if we were inclined to organise it.
Yet changing our focus from child protection to child welfare is crucial for the future of children. This means devoting less time, energy and money to dealing with allegations of abuse and neglect and more resources to developing healthy families in which abuse and neglect do not happen. This view is heard increasingly throughout the child care services as is the acknowledgement that such a re-ordering of priorities would be controversial - leading as it would to accusations that child protection was being abandoned - and would require courageous political backing.