Mothers should breastfeed their babies, goes the official policy. But the practicalities in State-run hospitals still militate against it, writes Victoria White.
'Irish babies deserve Irish formula and nothing less." There could be such style and swagger about a Government directive instructing supermarkets to give shoppers bonus points when they buy infant formula: "Matter a damn about World Health Organisation recommendations on the promotion of breastfeeding - we're a bottle-feeding nation."
All right, the Government doesn't really have a bottle-feeding policy, but the lack of a clear, resourced breastfeeding policy amounts to one. You need help to breastfeed the first time, and if you don't get enough, what are you going to do? You'll resort to one of the fine brands of infant formula which are available.
Over 60 per cent of you will be feeding your babies formula before you leave hospital, making us the least keen breastfeeders in Europe.
After a month, only 10 per cent of you will be breastfeeding. When you buy your formula in a supermarket with a bonus points system, you may notice you haven't got any for your formula purchase and this may be the strongest indication you have had that bottle-feeding is not the best option for your baby.
By then it is too late to do anything else. So there is, in this State, a stick, but no carrot to speak of.
If you've never tried to breastfeed a baby, it's likely you'll think this is nonsense. There's a National Breast-feeding strategy (1994); there is, since last year, a national breast-feeding co-ordinator (Maureen Fallon); there are advocating bodies such as La Léche and the Irish Childbirth Trust. There have even been telly ads - what more do you want?
The truth is that although all of these developments are positive and the number of breastfeeders in this country is very slowly going up, it is still only the lucky and the unusually well-resourced who get to breastfeed their babies.
It is they who are at less risk of developing breast cancer. It is their babies who are less prone to allergies, gastroenteritis, colds and middle-ear infections. It is their babies who are less likely to become obese or have high blood pressure and whose brain development is particularly assisted. No wonder Maureen Fallon recently described our breastfeeding rates as creating "a public health crisis".
They are the ones who can feel flushed with pride that their struggle paid off. Because it nearly always is a struggle to breastfeed for the first time. The shortage of midwives, the staff turnover and the lack of effective training to reverse the national antipathy to breastfeeding means that Irish women who have given birth recently in hospital are unlikely to have been given the help they needed to breastfeed with confidence.
My own experience last year was that I was breastfeeding twin boys happily and successfully and it was suggested I try "combined feeding", a mixture of bottle and breast. The nurse on duty that night in the National Maternity Hospital's private wing was worried that I wasn't getting enough sleep. My boys were just a couple of days old and I knew that if they took to the bottle they might never want to breastfeed again. I also knew that had I been a first-time mother, or younger or less confident, I would probably have tearfully taken her advice.
But the loss to my babies of the health benefits of breastfeeding would have been more serious. I still don't think I would have had the, ahem, bottle to do what a friend ended up doing for five months: pumping her own milk and bottle-feeding. The experience of breastfeeding was lost to her when a midwife presented her with a bottle of her own milk and told her to get 60 mls into her child every three hours.
• Victoria White is Arts Editor of The Irish Times