The quality of life for children in parts of Europe has reached levels as low as those experienced in the more deprived areas of Africa. The report issued by the European Children's Trust (ECT), which indicates that up to 50 million children in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union now live in poverty, is a damning indictment of the approach of many Western governments and economists to the transition from the command to the market economy.
Few query the ability of neo-liberal policies to bring the economies of former communist countries to a level of growth that can increase the living standards of their populations. But, as the report clearly shows, this can only be achieved in the long term and in the meantime the people suffer.
The application of economic "shock therapy" to the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was accompanied by the virtual abolition of state services and the removal of the basic safety nets available under the communist system. The result has been a social catastrophe of incredible proportions. Georgia, a state with a sub-tropical climate enabling it to grow an abundance of agricultural produce, has seen its GDP per capita fall to a level below that of Swaziland and its incidence of tuberculosis rise higher than that of India. Moldova, according to some indicators, has replaced Albania as Europe's poorest country. People die younger in Russia than in many Asian countries.
Living conditions have now, in many cases, reached third-world levels and, as is to be expected, children have suffered most. To ask children to bear the brunt of economic change is an extremely immoral proposition. This picture is far removed from that painted in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, or in Moscow when Mr Boris Yeltsin climbed on to a tank in 1991 to defy a hard-line coup d'etat. At that time the talk was of freedom, of "people power" overthrowing regimes which had imposed drab, oppressive lifestyles on their peoples.
The people of the East were welcomed back to the European community of nations. There was general support for Mr Mikhail Gorbachev's concept of a "common European home" from the Urals to the Atlantic. Now in the West - and Ireland is unfortunately no exception - many Easterners, who have suffered the privations of transition economies, are regarded with suspicion and disdain because of the poverty which has forced them to migrate.
The horrifying statistics revealed in the ECT report should play a part in changing the West's attitudes to its fellow Europeans to the east. If the thought of 50 million impoverished children on the borders of the European Union is not enough to spur action, then Western European hearts have hardened to an irredeemable degree. A programme of development in which funds are kept away from the unscrupulous hands of the few who, through corruption, have benefited from Eastern Europe's transition, is urgently needed.