The Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Coughlan, has announced she is about to produce a "coherent and comprehensive strategy for economic, employment and social policies to support families".
The Constitution says that the family is "founded on marriage", but Mary Coughlan has said that the State should no longer promote marriage as the norm. To change policy in this way, she would need to change the Constitution.
I was involved in the attempt to persuade the Irish people to permit divorce. Mary Coughlan would be taking on a big task to persuade the Irish people to drop the phrase in the Constitution which says that marriage is the foundation of the family. I will not say that I wish her luck, because I don't, but she would certainly need it!
The Whitaker Committee looked at the family articles in the Constitution back in 1996. It considered giving constitutional recognition to other family units. But it ran into difficulty in defining other family units apart from those based on marriage. For example, if one wanted to constitutionally recognise cohabitation, how long would a cohabitation have to have been in place for it to get constitutional recognition? In the absence of a dated contract, how do you prove length of cohabitation in a contested situation?
Whitaker therefore recommended that the Constitution continue to say that the State will protect the family based on marriage, but should also guarantee respect for family life, whether marriage based or not. Such a formula would require the State to continue to promote marriage as the norm towards which people would aspire, but to do so in a manner that respected other situations.
This was a wise approach. There are sound social reasons for promoting marriage. Children need fathers as well as mothers and marriage guarantees them access to both in a way that informal arrangements do not.
Marriage is a contract, with established rules to provide stability for children. Marriage also creates a contractual framework within which a spouse may take the risk of taking time off from earning money themselves to look after children. Marriage provides a legal framework in which a balance can be struck between paid work and unpaid caring.
Without the contractual foundation of marriage and, in the interests of their own financial security, cohabitees might sometimes feel that they had to prioritise paid work over unpaid caring for children, because they would not have the same financial guarantees of their own personal financial situation as a married person.
In her desire to be non-judgmental, Mary Coughlan is losing sight of something important. Partners need a stable legal framework if they are to make shared sacrifices for their children, and marriage provides that. Why then are so many couples declining to get married, even after they have decided to have children? The Government should commission objective social research on this. Is it the complexity of family law, a fear of lifelong commitment, or the cost of weddings?
Given that the international sociological evidence shows the benefits of marriage, we should find out why so many Irish couples are avoiding it. Mary Coughlan should look at every area where married couples or those who stay together, lose out.
Take income tax. A couple who have children and who later separate can each get two personal tax credits (four tax credits altogether), whereas if they stayed together, or reunited after separating, they would qualify for only one personal tax credit each (two tax credits altogether).
The Combat Poverty Agency has said that families with four or more children, and lone parents, have the highest risk of being poor. In a family with four or more children, one of the reasons they are likely to be poor is that with more children there is a greater necessity for one parent to opt out of paid work to be at home for the children. That option reduces incomes substantially.
Despite this cost, many of the means tests administered by the Government simply ignore the existence of a spouse staying at home. It is as if he (or, more usually, she) could live on fresh air!
For example, the cost of maintenance of a spouse at home is ignored in the means test for a medical card. The same applies to the higher education grant means test.
In calculating the cost of maintaining a household for purposes of eligibility for the Family Income Supplement (FIS), a spouse (or partner) at home with children is also ignored, whereas the cost of the children themselves is taken into account.
If a couple live together and are on social welfare, they get less of a child dependent allowance for their children than if they live apart. The Child Benefit paid to all parents is also far too low in the first four years of a child's life, when childcare costs are highest.
If a parent is living with a child and is receiving rent supplement, and then the other parent moves in to live with the child too, they will often lose the rent supplement. This discourages the creation of a two-parent family unit, and is anti-social.
Higher up the income scale, if one spouse stays at home to provide unpaid care for children, the tax band over which the couple pay the lower income tax rate is cut back from €56,000 to €37,000. That is a big financial penalty to pay, just for the privilege of providing unpaid care to children!
Mary Coughlan should consider making the needs of children the centrepiece of her proposed comprehensive strategy for families. That might allow the favourable tax treatment of couples to be concentrated on the period when there are dependent young children. It could also allow the concessions in the tax and welfare code to revolve around children and their needs, rather than the status of their parents.
Ireland was ahead of Britain in introducing children's allowances. We did it in 1944, while Britain waited longer to do so. We should put children first again now.
John Bruton TD is a former taoiseach and has been recently nominated as EU Ambassador to the United States