There is nothing unusual about a representative of the US federal government meeting Irish civil servants or cabinet ministers. However, my antenna went up when I heard that Wade F Horn was in town for that purpose last week, and I was delighted to get a chance to interview him.
Dr Horn is a man with a mission, and that mission is to ensure that as many children as possible grow up in intact, two-parent, married families. He believes that on average, children in stable marriages do better on a whole slew of social science indicators than children of lone parents, whether those parents are never married or divorced or separated.
That is not to say that lone parents cannot do a fine job, as patently they both can and do, but that on balance it is easier to achieve a good outcome with married and involved parents.
Given the sensitivities, it is intriguing that the Irish Government would be seen to be even dipping a toe in these particular waters. Mind you, there has been an undercurrent of unease that social welfare policy was actually preventing people setting up stable two-parent families, hardly an intended or desirable outcome.
Dr Horn has a neat line in self-deprecation. In the US government, he says, you can tell how important a person is by how short his or her title is: the president, the vice-president. He then points out that his own title is assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families. Be that as it may, although he oversees 65 social programmes, he has attracted an extraordinary amount of attention for just one of them, the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI).
This funds non-governmental organisations, including faith-based organisations, to deliver marriage education and skills-training on a strictly voluntary basis, primarily to lowincome and at-risk populations.
The Bush administration intends to spend $300 million annually on the HMI. The sums involved are relatively small. Dr Horn's oversees an annual budget of $46 billion.
The HMI is not uncontroversial. Some people oppose it because they believe the government has no right to intervene in people's relationships, to which Dr Horn replies that the government is already heavily involved in supporting one-parent families, so why not spend a tiny fraction of the budget on supporting marriage?
Others doubt it will have any effect, because single-parent families are often lacking in education and worthwhile job prospects, both of which are significant obstacles to marriage.
In response, Dr Horn asks whether stable marriages are to be reserved for well-off people? Ultimately, he says cheerfully, it does not matter whether individual initiatives succeed.
What matters is rescuing the marriage word, and making it a respectable part of the culture once again. He says that there is no precedent in history of getting more of something that people agree is good, by pretending it doesn't exist. For 20 years, the US government was afraid to mention marriage. Culturally, that spread a message that marriage was somehow an embarrassing anachronism. That is no longer the case.
There is now wide agreement across the political spectrum in the US that marriage works best for children. Of course, some social scientists argue that it is the quality of the relationship between parents and children that matters, not the family form. However, from left and right, there is a chorus of voices saying that marriage matters.
In 1994 president Bill Clinton lamented the decline of marriage, warning: "We cannot renew our country when within a decade more than half of the children will be born into families where there has been no marriage."
Something similar has been happening in academia. For example, Sara McLanahan, herself a lone parent, and a respected sociology researcher, set out to prove conclusively that it was not marriage, but poverty, that was the primary determinant of outcomes for children. Instead, her research led her to the conclusion that marriage matters. Not that poverty does not, but family form is intimately connected to poverty. Children raised by never-married parents, principally mothers, are at far more risk of poverty than those in married families.
Although Dr Horn may have been invited to Ireland by the Government, it is hard to imagine any Irish political administration embracing the idea of promoting marriage as an ideal. Firstly, we are aware that until all too recently lone parents were stigmatised and made to feel responsible for all the ills of society. No one wishes to return to that. We have not yet found a language that allows us to talk about the value of marriage in a way that does not appear to relegate unmarried parents to second-class status again.
This debate progressed in the United States by focusing on fatherhood. Do fathers matter? On average, is it better for children to grow up in a house where their dad loves them and loves their mother, and is committed to both them and her for life?
Few people would argue with that.Lone parenthood is rarely a conscious choice. Much more often, it is a less than desired outcome which people get on with and make the best of, out of love for their children.
What we need in Ireland is a recognition that when it comes to best outcomes for children, it is not a stand-off between those who believe family form is the most significant factor, and those who believe that poverty is most damaging. If we are serious about solving child poverty, we need to work on providing education for the most disadvantaged, that maximises their chances of finding satisfying work.
Education is one of the single biggest predictors as to whether people will delay childbearing until they are in a stable or married relationship.
We also need a generous social welfare system that provides a safety net, without disincentives to marriage.
Difficult? Sure. But it was difficult to move beyond stigmatising lone parents, particularly lone mothers.
Now we need to find ways of removing the stigma attached to saying that most adults and most children thrive in happy, married relationships, and trying to maximise the chances of that happening.