FAMILY. What does the word mean to you? "It makes me uncomfortable. I can't separate it from `values'. It's so smug, so exclusive, so so unforgiving, don't you think?" "A tight little unit, closeted behind a neat front door. But, God, from the things you read nowadays, your next thought is anything could be happening in there." "Mother, father. Married. Children - clean, loved, being taught basic Christian values. I suppose you Dublin people think that's very old fashioned?" "Mother and child. Somewhere in the background, deep background, a father." "Squabbling, shouting, hugging, washing, driving, eating, homework, rushing, hugging, more squabbling, a lot of shouting." "Me, my wife, our three children." "Is there such a thing anymore? I'm one of 10 and I've six of my own. But those days are gone. No one respects the family, any more. I'd be a Nora Bennis man.
Uncomfortable, apologetic, apprehensive, realistic, joyful, despairing: a crosssection of views from 15 people stepping off an intercity train in Dublin this week. Views as disparate as the nature of families themselves. For good or ill, this election has resurrected the notion of "family". Politicians who for decades studiously ignored the entry of vast numbers of married women into the lab our force and the terrible personal conflicts involved, are displaying a sudden keen interest in their welfare. Childcare, it seems, is no longer an ideologically unsound concept. And though none of the mainstream parties can cap Nora Bennis's charmingly airy proposal to pay mothers or fathers - £100 a week to stay at home with the children, nearly all find it opportune now to appease mothers in the home. Tax allowances, rebates, increased child benefit are being dangled enticingly. "Isn't it great to be a floating vo- ... eh, mother these days?" joked a woman this week, while a candidate looked deep into her eyes, extolled her baby's "lovely smile", and inquired solicitously about her childcare arrangements.
Meanwhile, running alongside this apparent breakthrough for mothers and families is a parallel universe, one in which a political leader, unwittingly or not, facilitates the venting of public spleen against another group of families; single mothers and their children. Where a 17 year old pregnant schoolgirl is excluded from a class presentation ceremony. Where teachers and parents vigorously oppose relationships and sexuality programmes in schools ("say `No' to those who would rob our children of their childhood"). Where there is continued dismay, in the words of one correspondent, about the "total failure of our leaders and public representatives generally to reflect the views of the 50 per cent of our society who voted against divorce ... or the 65 per cent who want an abortion referendum". Where a whole new political party is launched on precisely that premise and the notion that "the family" needs to be defended. But does it? And from what?
Like the "Nora Bennis man" quoted above, many people seem to recall a golden age of the family, an image that conjures up a nation of indulgent fathers puffing at pipes behind a newspaper, dispensing discipline and moral tone to their vast broods; and a legion of busy, fulfilled, apple checked mothers, never absent from the heart of the home, leading the Rosary while the stew bubbled on the stove.
But where that scenario existed, it was at a price, says Dr Tony Fahey, a sociologist with the ESRI. "There was certainly harmony and unity but that could operate in a destructive, damaging way. The problems now are new and certainly serious but they replace older problems, problems which were, objectively, just as serious. But because they were not defined as such, the result is a certain complacency that is hard to understand."
The cost of happy families in de Valera's time was borne by those who had none. A staggering third of all men in that era never married an outcome brought about by the lack of economic opportunity, by the cultural atmosphere, the fear of sex, the fact that farmers' sons often grew old waiting to inherit the land. Women fled the countryside because they dreaded the prospect of being a farmer's wife, leading to a surfeit of men in rural areas and a surfeit of women in the cities. "Go back to those times and you see appalling misery caused by this," says Dr Fahey. "Of course there were single people who coped very well but many were poor and miserable, becoming alcoholics - alcoholism wasn't seen as a drug addiction - ending up in psychiatric and geriatric wards, dying young." Schizophrenia, it seems, was rife but the question often asked now is whether this was just a convenient label. Where the family wasn't interested, committal was a solution.
The cultural bias then meant that to remain unmarried was thought normal, not abnormal. A young person, say, would be coming into early adulthood and it was accepted that he would never marry, would probably end up in the county home. But no one stood up and said `this is horrific' ... Noone was bothered that all these people would go through life without sexual relationships."
Somehow, despite this toxic under current, the line on social discipline was held. "Even with that huge single population, the illegitimacy rate was very low it hit rock bottom in 1960 - and that can only be reconciled with very, very harsh social discipline."
The legacy of that era is visible to anyone who cares to look. In the US, single and divorced people over 65 account for one in 10 of the population. In Ireland, the figure is one in four. Half of those currently in geriatric wards are unmauled, Dr Fahey says, "and there is plenty of evidence that people in their 50s and 60s are over represented in the institutions. There is a lot of talk now about family support being important for older people but to have support, you had to have a family and this demonstrates just how unevenly distributed family support is."
That legacy also includes the heartbreaking stories of mothers forced to give up their babies for adoption and the continuing and terrible testimony of children abused not only within their own two parent families, but in religious and State institutions.
Even the notion that in "the old days", couples were prepared to sacrifice their personal happiness for Church, children and duty teeters dangerously under scrutiny; society operated a short leash on women generally and in a time of total economic dependency on their husbands, what choice did they have, anyway?
The argument now, of course, is that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Figures for a decreasing birth rate, non marital births, marital breakdown, abortion, even contraception are used to suggest that the family we knew it is dead and that society is on its way to hell in a handcart.
The response to Mary Harney's proposal to keep unmarried mothers at home with their own mothers and fathers was less a thoughtful debate than a visceral urge to set them up as the personification of all our social ills.
Yes, it would be correct to say that at 15 per cent, Ireland has the highest percentage of lone parent families in Europe. But, says Dr Gabriel Kiely of the Family Studies Centre at UCD, statistics can be almost anything you want them to be. For a rather different picture, you might look instead at how many people live in lone parent families as a percentage of the population. The figure then is just 6 per cent compared to an EU average of 10 per cent. The difference is that the 15 per cent figure is worked out as a percentage of three family groups: couples with children, couples without and lone parent families. Given the image of the lone parent as the feckless teenager, living in luxury at the taxpayer's expense, it's worth noting that of that 15 per cent, well over a quarter have a mother aged over 65. And of the remainder, two thirds already live at home and only a fifth claim a rent allowance.
The vast majority, furthermore, move off the allowance after around three years, either to take up employment or get married. And, lest people need reminding, many lone parents make the best parents.
But just to prove that the family as we knew it is with us still, Dr Kiely points out that we are still top of the heap in Europe when it comes to the stereotypical family; 70 per cent of our family groups are couples with children.
So the family is alive without a doubt. But no one would attempt to suggest that we do not have serious problems: many, however, say the source of our problems isn't always the obvious one. For example, if the single biggest risk to children is poverty, then the figures suggest that the large, "in tact," family is the one in most serious trouble.
A recent survey of prisoners in Mountjoy showed that more than two thirds come from large families (five siblings or more) and that three quarters of those families have a father and a mother in the home.
"None of this is to say that the problems in lone parent families aren't serious, but that much of the work being done is almost to deny the traditional family form and the problems it might be experiencing," Tony Fahey says.
MARITAL breakdown is accelerating. So is the rate of nonmarital births. But few with a historical overview see these figures as grounds for despair. "I'm not at all depressed about the family," says Dr Gabriel Kiely. "We have the trauma of rapid change and it is so easy to confuse reorganisation with disintegration." We are now seeing the impact of the industrialisation of Ireland, which has been going on for 30 years, he says The result is a movement away from dependence on the family as a social institution to the role played by family in organising social relations. Economic survival is now possible outside the family, a fact reflected in the increased participation of carried women in the lab our force.
"I'm not suggesting or even implying that mothers are the cause of this," Dr Kiely says. "It's just one link in the chain of change. A key factor is that the changing of marriage from an institutional base to having a relationship base, has led to families being more fragile." In other words, where economic dependency is not an issue, a marriage nowadays is only as good as the relationship.
At the same time, preliminary work carried out by Dr Kiely (backed up by other studies) gives no indication that people are running willy nilly out of the marital home at the first sign of rot. "From a small sample, most were married for more than 10 years and studies suggest that they would encounter difficulties in the first five years of their relationship. The work so far indicates that people don't rush out of the marriage far from it."
Women's voices have been central to the debate about the changing nature of the family. The National Women's Council, through its chairwoman, Noreen Byrne, is constantly calling on political parties to acknowledge that our Constitution excludes a growing proportion of families, something which she finds "upsetting and worrying". She has also called on numerous occasions for political strategies which would lead to greater responsibility along young people and reduce the number of teenage pregnancies.
It is hardly a coincidence that the leader of the newest party of the family happens to be a woman. Or that nine of the 14 members of the state sponsored Commission on the Family are women. Dr Harry Ferguson, a senior lecturer at UCC, is particularly struck by the "in visibility" of fathers in relation to public debates about the family "the implicit assumption being that family is synonymous with women".
"So if a party is promoting family values, they have to stick a picture of a woman beside the Taoiseach. What value do men put on family and why don't they tell us?" he asks.
He is certain that family and issues around fathers and "the almost total absence of supports for fathers", are going to become "very political issues in the next few years exemplified by John Waters's writing". But neither is he demanding fathers' rights without responsibility: for all the talk about the new, nurturing, nappyhappy Dad, the evidence suggests fathers still have a "minimal involvement in direct childcare".
But there has been a change for the better, he believes; so far, however, no one has been able to measure it. Whatever the extent of the change, it has not kept pace with the cultural expectation, which is that the nurturing, fully accountable (rather than merely "helping") father should now be the norm. For all the advances made by women and the unprecedented overtures from different quarters, Harry Ferguson believes "families have never been a more dangerous place to live".
"While women have new opportunities to find safety, this ironically has led to new dangers for women," he says.
THE increase in the number of women who have been killed and in violence against women generally can be brought back to a new demand for negotiation and the fact that there are men who refuse to negotiate what it boils down to are men who refuse to talk to their wives. Women have gone on all these courses, engaged in personal development work. And men by contrast, are emotionally at sea.
Lost. I suppose where this is leading into is how much work men in general have still to do."
But the word is generally optimistic.
Irish society is in fundamental transition and in some surprising ways. Dr Gabriel Kiely is concerned for an increasing number of middle aged married women who, far from rushing off to Nepal to find themselves, are faced with three and four generation households to care for an ageing parent, a grown child perhaps with a child of his or her own. "Where are the supports?" he asks of this new brand of family solidarity. "Never lose sight of the baby in the pram," says Bishop Eamonn Walsh, in response to the onslaught on single mothers. "Some great things are happening but there is no coordination", says Gemma Rowley, founder of Ally and member of the Commission on the Family. "Not enough attention is being focused on the welfare of the children. The problems that children face are found in all sorts of circumstances," Dr Tony Fahey says.
And as the dust clears, it's worth noting that nearly half of the over 500 submissions to the Commission on the Family were concerned not with the old reliables of abortion, contraception and divorce, but with education. The tyranny of the single truth no longer reigns.
