Up to 18% of young children in Ireland are not living with their fathers, according to new research from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
The fresh data, taken from the Growing Up in Ireland study, produced in partnership with the Government, claims that 14% of children in this country aged between nine months and five years do not live with their fathers full-time, with the figure rising to 18% by age nine. It’s no surprise to read that it found households with parental separation were more disadvantaged.
I find it so interesting that in a time where the chatter about the manosphere is endless, as UK PM Starmer throws his enthusiastic backing behind Netflix’s Adolescence to be shown in schools, surveys like this one – exposing a societal gape of such severity – are really of little interest to our media and policymakers. It is simply an unfashionable, inconvenient truth, that absent fathers are harming their children’s futures.
Maybe it’s understandable because in the past, we in Ireland were very critical of single parenthood – with the weight of criticism pointed at young women who became pregnant outside of marriage.
That was wrong, but it doesn’t mean that we should now just set aside the many decades of international evidence showing that it is damaging for children to grow up without dads. It’s not about stigmatising single parents or the heroic mothers who raise their children without anyone to fall back on – but it’s about asking the basic question: Where are the dads? They are, at present, a missing piece of the puzzle.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch MP has done what few Irish politicians will do in raising the crisis. Writing in the Times last year, she pointed to the prison population, where the majority of men serving sentences grew up without a father at home. Many of us will also be familiar with the plight experienced by fatherless daughters, who more often struggle with a lack of self esteem and dysfunctional relationships.
“Parenting is a two-person job. Where are the dads?” Badenoch wrote. “It was my dad who was excited about me becoming a politician,” she said, crediting her late father with her success. But the converse is also true when we consider children’s cognitive development. There are countless studies showing that babies who have fathers with an active involvement in their care during the first months of life perform better in cognitive tests. If early paternal involvement is crucial for a child’s growth, why do we pretend fathers are disposable?
There’s also a point to be made that as a country, we seem to love to talk about how dreadful things used to be. But it’s harder to find the will to talk about how bad things actually are, right now. Take RTE rolling out their new ‘Housewife of the year’ documentary, revisiting the competition which took place in the late sixties to the mid-nineties. A review in the Irish Times rattles on about how the programme serves as a “reminder that Ireland of the 1970s and 80s was no country for women of any age.”
Ed Power writes: “If the “Lovely Girls” episode of Father Ted was a horror movie, it might have looked something like Housewife of the Year (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.30pm). Ciaran Cassidy’s documentary about the only-in-Ireland “best mammy” contest, hosted each year by Gay Byrne through the 1980s and early 1990s, depicts the event as a glorified pageant for homemakers and a sort of Handmaid’s Tale-type ritual that left women in little doubt where they stood in post-DeValera Ireland. Young, old, in-between – the film is a reminder that Ireland was no country for women of any age, and Housewife of the Year let them know it.”
Power talks about how the programme captures the “low-wattage despair” of early 80s Ireland, a “grim jamboree.”
Ireland’s “dark past” is always on the agenda – and to be honest, I’m calling bullshit on this claim that the 80s were anything like that grim. The economy was in the toilet, for sure, but the women I know have rubbished this claim of perpertual repression in conversation with me repeatedly.
There was, they say, a better sense of community in those years, and as Robert Putnam so comprehensively captured in his masterful ‘Bowling Alone’ – which is as true for this country as the U.S. – the decline in connectedness, in social capital, is real and impoverishing in ways that are sometimes difficult to acknowledge.
What’s wrong with being a housewife anyway? Surely that’s an equally valid choice if women want to be homemakers? And why is having children always equated by the media with drudgery and misery? No wonder the population is imploding.
Maybe all the gloom about our supposedly awful past is a distraction tactic so that we can keep lying to ourselves about how great things are for us now. Mother and Baby homes may be gone. But shame around pregnancy still persists to the point where we have 10,000 abortions annually. Is that a great improvement?