The most important piece of social research ever undertaken here is the huge Growing Up in Ireland study being carried out at the Economic and Social Research Institute and Trinity College Dublin. This long-term tracking of almost 20,000 children, young people and their families has now completed its first decade of work.
It is fair to say that some of its results, brought together in the excellent book Cherishing All the Children Equally? published by the ESRI this week, are shameful.
Ireland has shown itself to be a society capable of giving all of its children a great start in life. But far too many children are being left behind, at a terrible cost to themselves and to Ireland’s future.
For all that we like to think of ourselves as an egalitarian culture, inequality is stamped on the bodies of our citizens literally from birth. Children born to mothers in the lowest income group are 42 per cent more likely to be born light compared to those in the highest income group. By the age of nine months, those children are already visibly different and by the age of three they are shorter in stature and more likely to be overweight and obese.
The biggest burden of the austerity years that followed the great crash of 2008 was placed on those least able to bear it. In 2013 Eurostat reported that Ireland ranked 23rd out of 27 EU countries in tackling child poverty. A study published by UNICEF in 2014 placed Ireland 37th out of 41 developed countries in the protection of children from poverty during the global financial crash. The child poverty rate in Ireland rose by more than 10 per cent between 2008 and 2012, while 18 other states recorded a reduction.
In Ireland in 2008, 6.8 per cent of children were living in consistent poverty, assessed in terms of both low income and their household’s access to basic resources such as warm clothes and high protein meals.
By 2013, that figure had almost doubled to 11.7 per cent and 138,000 children were living in consistent poverty. As the new study concludes, with admirable restraint, “one can conclude that the welfare of the most vulnerable children is not a government or societal priority”.
The consequences of this neglect are stark. Children in one-parent families are twice as likely to live in poverty. There are now more than 2,000 homeless children living in temporary accommodation that is entirely unsuitable. In 2015, 77 per cent of the teachers reported that the number of children coming to school hungry had increased in the previous year.
Even infant mortality, which we like to think of as an aspect of the dark past, still haunts Irish society: 10 per cent of Traveller children die before the age of two compared to one per cent in the general population.
On practically every measure used in the Growing Up in Ireland study, there is a stark class divide between our children: "children's outcomes vary by class, with children from higher income households consistently faring better than children from lower income households".
We pride ourselves on having made great strides towards respecting the equal dignity of all our citizens. But these huge and deeply damaging divisions are more profound even than the discrimination on the basis of race, creed, gender or sexual orientation we so rightly despise.
They are not legacies of the past – they are shaping our future society as one that values people according to the accidents of birth. Until we see the ending of child poverty as the greatest challenge facing our society, we have no right to pretend to be a republic of equals.