Childcare is the dominant issue as the Family Support Agency publishes its strategy next week. Will action follow words this time, asks Kitty Holland
Samantha Freeman, a separated mother of two teenage boys from Crumlin, Dublin, would like her long-term partner to come and live with them. They've done their sums though and if they were to set up home together they would be almost €40 a week poorer.
"See, I get €173 on my book as a lone parent," she says. "But if he moved in I'd lose that and he'd have to claim for me as a dependant - and he'd only get €134.80 for me."
Samantha is one of a group of women gathered over tea and coffee in the Liberties in Dublin this week to discuss family life. Two men were to join us but, explains Leo Scales, chairman of the National Family Resource Forum, who has invited us, "they got a bit shy".
Michelle (28), a single mother of two (aged eight and six), works part-time but would "love to go full-time". She can't, because she has to be home by 1.30 p.m. when her youngest gets home from school.
"I have looked into crèches but they're just too expensive," she says. "If I put them in a crèche I'd pay my whole wages over for a stranger to look after them. Why would you do that?"
Tina, who has a partner and two children, works as a machinist in a clothes factory, "but I've a third baby on the way and I'd say I'll have to give up work then. It'll be too difficult to ask anyone to look after three".
Another woman explains that she has a sister who helps look after her kids and that she wouldn't be able to work at all if it wasn't for her.
As the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Coughlan, prepares to publish the Family Support Agency (FSA) strategic plan this week, and to host aEU conference on Families, Change and Social Policy in Dublin Castle on Thursday and Friday, the questions of what constitutes a family and how the Government should support it are again being raised.
The FSA's two-year strategic plan will not make specific policy recommendations, according to chief executive Pat Bennett, though it will advocate enhanced support for relationships in crisis, lone parents and parents under pressure.
But the big issue that affects so many aspects of family life is childcare.
Although not representative of every Irish family, the Liberties women speak for a growing number of people who regard the Catholic, Constitutional vision of the nuclear family as increasingly irrelevant.
As Prof Mary Daly, of Queen's University Belfast, author of a recent report, Families and Family Life in Modern Ireland: Challenges For the Future, said at its publication in February, more lone parents, same-sex parents, unmarried parents, changing values and diverse cultural beliefs are all pushing the boundaries of what "family" means in modern Ireland.
And people no longer want family to be seen as a wholly private domain, the report found, following a series of consultation forums held around the country late last year. They want family, in its diversity, to be seen to be valued and the Government actively, even in an interventionist way, to support it.
Although Coughlan has said that the national forums and Prof Daly's findings would "have a major influence on family policy in current years", it remains to be seen whether the Government will adequately address the issues putting pressure on families, particularly housing and childcare costs. While spiralling housing costs increasingly force both parents out to work, childcare costs are such that grandparents often find themselves roped into rearing the next generation.
"The extent to which people feel in control of what is happening, even in their own families, is limited," says Prof Daly. "People feel family life is not valued at policy level. One person at one of the forums asked: 'When was the last time we heard the Government refer to Ireland as a society and not as an economy, Ireland Inc?' "
Among Prof Daly's findings is the extent to which "choice" is felt to be severely limited. A 2002 report, Contemporary Family Policy (also published by Coughlan's department), stated: "Prosperity in the new millennium is understood not just as financial wellbeing but also as a way of living in which choice is uppermost."
However, according to Prof Daly's report, "policy in the current climate gives little support or encouragement for people to 'choose' to be involved in home and family on a full-time basis".
As Scales points out, when one cannot access affordable childcare it is impossible to "choose" to be a working single mother. And when the rent or mortgage is so high that both parents have to work it is going to be a formidable task for either of them to "choose" to stay at home with the children for their first five years.
Equally, it is difficult to see how a mother who can only just afford to feed and clothe her children properly can "choose" to bring them on an occasional outing to the cinema or the seaside.
Next week's EU conference will discuss these issues and no doubt recommendations will be made, just as they were in the 1998 Commission on the Family report. Interestingly, many of the conclusions and findings six years ago were repeated at last year's much-vaunted consultation forums.
And given that recommendations in favour of "family-impact statements" (looking at the consequences of Government policy) and annual vouchers of €1,850 for children aged under three were never implemented, some may be sceptical about future action.
This scepticism, says Scales, is not surprising when Coughlan's own department introduces cuts which "damage families". He wonders sometimes, he adds, just how central to contemporary policy development "family matters ever really will be". Time will tell.