This is the time of year when we think above all about children, about their need for love and security, about their capacity for joy. As adults, we measure ourselves by our capacity to provide those things. We draw a line under our failings and mistakes, our moments of neglect, indifference and irascibility. We return, in our minds at least, to an ideal of care and affection.
When we say that this time is for children, what we really mean is that it is for reminding ourselves what our relationship with children ought to be like. We assuage our guilt with sacrificial offerings to the spirit of childhood. There may be large elements of self-delusion about all of this, but at least we are trying.
Something similar happens at the collective level of government and national policy. Children bug the national conscience. They make a nonsense of the comfortable free-market view that everyone gets what he or she deserves, because no one deserves to be born into poverty, neglect and disadvantage. Children may not be pure, but they are, at least in economic terms, innocent.
Since they do not act on the economic stage, they cannot be blamed for the wild inequalities between them. If a substantial proportion of our children are locked out from the future to which the rest can reasonably aspire, there must be something at work beyond their own failure to exploit economic opportunities. Child poverty nags at our collective conscience because it defies the official image of a land in which there is prosperity for all. So we act, collectively, like parents at Christmas time, doling out gifts to causes such as the elimination of educational disadvantage. The presents keep us happy, but they do not change anything.
In 1994, 24.5 per cent of Irish children lived in households which had less than 60 per cent of the median income. In 1997, the figure was 23.5 per cent. In 2000, it was 23.7 per cent. In 2003, it was 23.9 per cent.
So, over the decade of the most spectacular growth in wealth in Irish history, nothing much has changed in this regard. About a quarter of our kids - close to a quarter of a million - still live in relative poverty.
This is not an abstract statistical quirk. You can see its concrete consequences most clearly in our schools. Every state body now accepts that education is the critical determinant of our individual and collective futures. As we strip away so much of our manufacturing base and come to depend more and more on high-skilled jobs, the cost of being out of the educational loop is rising all the time. And a significant number of our kids are already very far out indeed.
One child in 10 is not leaving primary school with even an adequate level of literacy. A study of primary schools in disadvantaged areas, published this year by the Department of Education's inspectorate, found that over one-third of pupils were missing school for more than 20 days a year. And 43 per cent of pupils had reading scores at the bottom level of achievement, compared to just 6 per cent who were at the top of the range, while 64 per cent had scores for mathematics which were in the bottom category and just 3 per cent were in the top bracket.
No progress has been made, meanwhile, on the issue of early school-leaving. Over one-quarter of boys do not make it as far as the Leaving Certificate. Of the class who entered second-level schools in 1991, 84 per cent sat the Leaving. Of the class who entered in 1996, just 82 per cent did so.
The Government's official social inclusion strategy set few specific targets for improving the lot of children, and those which were set are not being met. A review of progress, published by the Government last summer, notes that "it is unlikely that the target of a school completion rate of 90 per cent will be met by 2006".
The aim to "halve the proportion of pupils with serious literacy difficulties by 2006" is now officially acknowledged as "unlikely" to be met, partly because no one bothered to specify what figure was to be halved.
As the Department of Education itself notes, in an inadvertently eloquent statement of how seriously these goals are taken, the "target does not specify what the proportion of pupils with serious literacy difficulties is to be reduced from. Therefore, it is not clearly evident if progress is being made".
The target of getting 95 per cent of Traveller children to at least start secondary school by 2004 was missed. The target to "reduce the gap in low birth weight rates between children from the lowest and highest socio-economic group by 10 per cent by 2007" will be missed, again at least in part because the State does not even know what that gap is.
When it comes to children, in other words, the State has more missed targets than a short-sighted archer on a foggy day.
The political equivalent of a few stocking-fillers will be included in every Budget to assuage our collective guilt, but the will to really make a difference is as flimsy as a new year's resolution.