This book is one of the very few to examine how economic factors and public policies interact with individuals' personal aspirations as expressed in their family lives. It then poses fundamental questions about how policy-makers should respond to the broader needs of society in designing economic policies.
Finola Kennedy is an economist and was a member of the Second Commission on the Status of Women who wrote the minority report advocating (in 1990) an increase of £5 a week in child benefit. In this study of 100 years of family change in Ireland, she argues that the changes that occurred in the Irish family had taken place earlier in other European countries. As Ireland's economy changed, so did its patterns of family life.
These changes have been widely chronicled: the drop in fertility rates from more than four live births per female of child-bearing age in 1965 to less than two in 1998; the rise in births outside marriage so that they now account for almost one-third of all births; the legalisation of contraception and divorce; and the rise in the number of mothers in the paid labour force. All feature in any discussion of modern Irish society.
The reasons for these changes are complex and were fundamentally driven by economic rather than ideological forces. "Changes in family patterns have been driven by economic factors which, when they gained sufficient strength, tended to outweigh those of tradition and religion," she writes. "Policy and institutional changes were frequently introduced to accommodate choices already made by the people."
The most fundamental shift that occurred in Irish society was its transformation from a predominantly agricultural to a predominantly urban one. As late as 1961 the majority of the population lived in rural areas, and until the mid-1960s there were more people employed in agriculture than in industry. "Paramount among the values and beliefs of rural dwellers was the desire to keep the farm - the basis for economic survival - intact."
Kennedy points out that, until the 1960s, there was a broad consensus on most aspects of family life in Ireland. She quotes from an Irish Times editorial of 1937, the year the Constitution was passed, that fulminated against working married women. "Such cases, we think, demand investigation, not only on the score of justice, but also on the ground that a dangerous view of the marriage state is being inculcated," it thundered. "Some day, please Heaven, the nation will be so organised that work will be available for every man, so that he may marry and assume the burdens of a home, and for every woman until she embarks upon her proper profession - which is marriage." This view was supported by the trade union movement until the 1970s.
But by 2000 only 8 per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture. In the meantime, Ireland had entered the European Community and taken on board the social and equality legislation that flowed from membership. Vatican II had encouraged Catholics to follow their own consciences and the feminist movement and the media presented alternative sets of values. Kennedy is at her most illuminating when she points out that no policy is neutral, and examines the effect of different public policies on the family. Yet decisions on such policies are being made with very little discussion of what our priorities are, and apparently in response only to the perceived needs of the economy.
"What matters at this point," she says, "is the clear recognition that the functioning of society depends on co-operation between individuals - men and women - and between generations. If a measure of a civilised society is the protection and support that society provides for minorities, and ultimately for individuals, there are limits to which individual fulfilment can become the uniquely dominant objective, without a high social cost."
Carol Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of a number of books and essays on women and society