Two communities coexist in Ireland - one happy and prosperous and one where hope is at a premium - and finding ways to unite them between now and 2016 would be a fitting way to celebrate the centenary of the Proclamation of Independence, Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay has said.
Delivering the Irish Medical Organisation's Doolin memorial lecture, Are all the Children of Ireland equal?, on Saturday, Mr Finlay pointed to official statistics showing 100,000 children live in consistent poverty in Ireland, and the proportion of children trapped in poverty rose from 9.5 per cent in 2004 to 10.2 per cent in 2005. "In a country that is admired throughout the world for its ability to generate wealth, the number of children in consistent poverty is going up."
"Consistent poverty" was not an anodyne income figure, he said. It meant inadequate nutrition, clothing, heating, toys and play, as well as inadequate healthcare and educational access.
"Although not included in the official definitions, consistent poverty frequently has other meanings too. It means increasing marginalisation, increasing alienation and an increasing likelihood that the child who has been raised in consistent poverty will raise his or her own children in the same circumstance," he added.
Mr Finlay observed the communities, where many helped by Barnardos live, shared common features. First, disadvantage is often built into them and they lack basic amenities such as a safe place to play or decently heated houses. Second, they carry a certain stigma, so to reveal you came from one of those neighbourhoods was itself a serious obstacle to being accepted in a better job or school.
"And third, many of them now are ringed by fine roads, dual carriage-ways and even motorways. We have almost invented this new concept in Ireland: drive-by poverty."
If trends continued, Mr Finlay suggested, we might in 2016 be celebrating the fact that 100 years of independence had made us the richest country in the world. But it would be practical to live up to the famous injunction in the Proclamation to "pursue the happiness of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally".
While some believed the institutions most undermined by Ireland's new "moral individualism" were the traditional family and organised churches, he contended "perhaps our biggest failure has been to fail to value childhood".
