Sir, - Dr Garret FitzGerald's assertion that births outside marriage "endanger social cohesion" (Opinion, September 23rd) is not based only on his analysis of the available birth-rate statistics but also upon a distortion of another statistic relating to social disadvantage.
Having set out the figures, he states that "there is a huge weight of evidence that children born into and brought up in single-parent families, other than families headed by widowed single parents, have a much higher chance of being disadvantaged, not just in childhood but also thereafter. A significant part of our social problems derives from this source."
It is correct that a significant part of our social problems derives from social disadvantage, but this is not caused by single-parent families. It would have been more accurate for Dr FitzGerald to have said that persons from socially disadvantaged backgrounds (which social disadvantage is the source of a significant part of our social problems) are more likely than others to become single parents and that their children are likely to share their social disadvantage. - Yours, etc.,
Anthony Harris, St Agnes's Road, Crumlin Village, Dublin 12.