The Australian Minister for Finance, Peter Costello, gave journalists a good laugh this week, when he suggested that people should have three children, writes Breda O'Breda.
"You should have one for your husband, one for your wife and one for your country."
When the laughter subsided, he advised them all to go home and do their patriotic duty that night. It might be typical robust Aussie humour, but he was being deadly serious. Australia needs babies, and he is willing to give Australian mothers AUS$3,000 to encourage them to have another child. He is dispensing tax breaks potentially worth $50 a week, and creating childcare and after-school care places, all in an effort to ensure the long-term viability of Australia.
The Australian minister's family values might have made you smile, but one sure way to wipe the smile off your face is to visit one of the pages of the UN website dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Year of the Family. (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/family/majortrends.htm)
There are no laughs at all on this page, which looks at four major trends: changes in family structures, demographic ageing, rise of migration and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. For example, there has been a rise in one-person households, and in people living together. The latter is a much less stable family form. Women are marrying later and having fewer children. Birth rates in most parts of the developed world are well below replacement level.
(We have been quite complacent in Ireland. In 2003, our birth rate was the highest for 15 years. However, only 28 per cent of births in 2003 were to women who already had two or more children, which, according to the Central Statistics Office, reflects a trend towards smaller families. There are more women of childbearing age, but fewer are having "one for the country". We are delaying, not evading, the demographic decline evident almost everywhere else in the developed world.)
In developing countries, the birth rates are 3.1 children per woman, and it is only in the least developed countries that the rates remain relatively high, at 5.47. As these countries develop, and women become more educated, these numbers will drop, too.
Funny, is it not, that all those dire warnings about over-population have become very muted of late? Given a combination of fewer births, and entire areas of developing countries being devastated by HIV/AIDS, the doomsday scenarios have stopped being pushed so strongly. In fact, it looks like doomsday lies in another direction.
The population is ageing, to the extent that by 2050 one-third of the world's population will be over 60. HIV/AIDS has led to the rise of adolescent or grandparent-headed households as the middle generation is laid waste. Migration is another major trend, with all the stresses that it brings to families who are forced into being separated from each other.
Anyone following the New Irish series in this newspaper will have seen the damage done by our policies of seeing migrant workers as mere instruments to serve our economy, and not as human beings with families.
Father Bobby Gilmore is a Columban priest, who works with the migrant community here in Ireland. He tells of Maria, a Filipina mother of four children, aged between three and 10. She arrived in Dublin to work as a childminder for a couple in an affluent Dublin suburb.
Maria sends money every month to Helena, a childminder in her town, who looks after Maria's four little ones. Helena is also a mother of four children, aged between five and 12. While she is caring for Maria's four, she pays Theresa from a neighbouring village to mind her own two children. Helena's husband is a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. Theresa's mother minds her children when she is away caring for Helena's children.
As Bobby Gilmore says, this is like an "international mothering chain". Each woman lavishes attention on another woman's children, in the hope that the woman minding her own children will do the same. All of the carers are living off the earnings of the Irish woman, who has to work because of the high mortgage on her family home.
An economist once remarked acerbically that the emancipation of women in Sweden was based on half the women in the country minding the other half's children. Recent times have seen a new twist. The emancipation of women in the West is increasingly dependent on women from the developing world who must leave their children at home.Yet, if she is a good employer, the villain of the piece is not necessarily the Irish woman.
If her employer gives up work, Maria will still have to work outside her country. The economy in the Philippines has been relatively stagnant. Many complex factors, ranging from corruption and incompetence to the ruthless demands of a globalised market, conspire to keep the Philippines poor. It is ironic that many Filipinos, who are from a deeply family-oriented culture, are being forced to sacrifice that value just to survive.
We need to face the fact that there is an inexorable decline in births in the West. It may seem an impossibly long way away, but a Leaving Cert student this year will be just due for retirement in 2050. She will have over two billion others in the world over 60 for company. What she will not have, if trends continue, is enough younger people to guarantee her a pension.
The UN web page concludes morosely: "Trends challenge the ability to fulfil basic functions of production, reproduction, socialisation, as well as needs of family members regarding health, nutrition, shelter, physical and emotional care and personal development."
We have seen a decade or more of attempts to come to terms with the crisis facing the environment. Yet there is not, even yet, a sense of urgency about making strong families a priority in our world. If we do not get sense, it will take far more than the likes of Peter Costello's jokes and incentives to reverse catastrophic trends.