OPINION:Ireland is, by European standards, a young nation and it has a special obligation to think carefully about what development path will best meet children's needs, writes Brendan Gleeson
I'M AN Australian academic on sabbatical leave at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. I have a scholarly interest in and personal passion for the creation of child-friendly cities and communities.
My starting point is that many developed nations, especially the English-speaking ones, have for some time neglected children in their collective thinking and in their public policies.
One reflection of this is cities and neighbourhoods that have, in a variety of ways, become less friendly, even harmful, to children and to the people that care for them. Changes to higher density through redevelopment have often designed out children and carers - crowded spaces, no place for play, no family services and housing designed for the childless and the artless. Neighbourhoods are riven with traffic, and many roads endanger children and restrict possibilities for healthy activity.
A public liability crisis reinforced by blunt health and safety strictures has dumbed down children's play environments. Green spaces where wild, nourishing play occurred have been lost to relentless urban development. This list unfortunately goes on.
I have a lecture I give on this topic which also points out some of the ways that we might make our cities better for children. Recently I was in Sligo to deliver said seminar at the Institute of Technology. Not long before, I wandered the environs around the IT and chanced upon a Famine graveyard. This encounter moved me deeply and caused me to ponder anew the inexplicable tendency of humans to harm their young, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes, sadly, intentionally.
The graveyard had a heavy air about it that suggested mass death. Interments too populous for headstones and a separate yard reserved for children. Wikipedia tells me that about 2,000 people were buried in this graveyard. I sat for a while in the children's graveyard and wept a little. Doubtless like other parents in this situation, you can't help but imagine your own children cloned in lifeless heaps under the surface. It's the only way to touch the awe of it all. From later reflection emerges a social sensibility; you begin to imagine the vast swathe of families cut down by An Gorta Mór.
This emotional ambush rocked my assuredness. I'd given this presentation many times in Australia, New Zealand and now in Ireland.
It was always well received. But suddenly now, slumped tearfully in a graveyard I'd not sought out, I wondered did I really know what I was talking about? What right had I to speak about harm to children in rich environments that these poor dead souls would have greatly desired?
Some critical reflection eventually reset my compass of thought to a slightly new course. And a sharper one, I think. First, I realised my own distant personal connection to where I sat. My ancestors left Ireland for Australia in the late 1840s in the wake of the hunger. This helped to ease the alienation of the moment. Second, I reflected that societal harm to children occurs both with conscious, murderous purpose and, much more insidiously, unintentionally. My work points to the way urban change is working against children at the insidious end of the scale. I realised it's right and necessary to work against both forms of harm.
Terry Eagelton writes that at the time of An Gorta Mór, England's esteemed economist Nassau Senior remarked that a million dead in Ireland would "scarcely be enough to do much good". It suggests a deranged mind that can work at both ends of the harm scale: explicit in heartless intention but surely insensitive to suffering.
A third idea occurred to me as I sat with the lost children. My own connection to the Famine was not merely ancestral. I'm part of a consumptive urban culture that is implicated in the hunger and death inflicted on children in developing countries today. A great food recession is sweeping the Earth as agricultural output is diverted from human stomachs to petrol tanks.
This would not be occurring if cities, where the majority of humanity now lives, were not the voracious users of oil they are. Our stubborn car dependency has made cities more polluted and unsafe for our kids. And it has made us dependent on a declining and costly resource with disastrous consequences for children elsewhere. Like junkies we're lunging at a new quick fix, biofuels, as our oil supplies dry up. No questioning of the habit itself.
The destruction of forests and conversion of farmland for biofuel production have made food much more expensive and less easy to obtain in the developing world. Last year a senior UN official, Jean Ziegler, called biofuels a "crime against humanity". Even the International Monetary Fund is worried.
I'd travelled to Sligo on a train that at times I could have walked beside. The Irish Government is undertaking a major improvement of its rail systems but it is also building vast new road networks.
Only a very narrow calculus sees road network expansion as good for children, in Ireland or abroad.
We owe the children of the Earth an urban lifestyle that does not deny them food.
Ireland is, by European standards, a young nation. It has a special obligation to think carefully about what development path will best meet children's needs. The nation's rapidly expanding cities and towns need close attention.
In any country, urban development that ignores children's wellbeing will work insidiously against them. The cities will get richer and brighter, but will be poorer places for children and their carers. Our feast will be their famine.
Brendan Gleeson is professor of urban management and policy director - urban research programme at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia"Our stubborn dependency on cars has made cities more polluted and unsafe for children