Fathers and Family Policy In Ireland

The State has traditionally supported lone mothers – and has not required paid work of them. In 1990, the Lone Parent Allowance extended State support to fathers. These State supports were integrated in the 1997 One Parent Family Payment. In 2000, we still had a Minister for Justice and Law Reform stating that whether a parent decides to enter or “re-enter the workforce outside the home should be a matter of choice”.

In 2000, also, appeared a Review of the One Parent Family Payment. This showed itself aware of neo-liberal currents elsewhere which advocated paid labour outside the home for unattached mothers or fathers. But the authors gravitated to the general position that a U.S.-type labour-market approach was impractical and unacceptable for Ireland “because the childcare infrastructure required to support such a condition is not in place yet”. However, reference was made to the introduction of a maintenance recovery programme – under what was until then a dormant Liable Relation Provision.

By 2004, by contrast, we find the demand for a maintenance recovery programme in full cry – as we hear the Minister for Social and Family Affairs state that the courts had been enforcing this since the year 2000; he warned that “applicants for One Parent Family Payment are legislatively required to make ongoing efforts to seek adequate maintenance from” the other parent. Far from lying dormant, the Liable Relative Provision had been activated with a vengeance.

What a turn-about even from the mid-l990s (and the introduction of the One Parent Family Payment)! The ethos prevailing then – echoing the Constitution (and Catholic communitarian values) – held “that women with children worked full-time in the home”. The rationale adopted then had been explicitly opposed to a maintenance recovery programme: non-resident fathers were targeted as sources of family support rather than as potential sources of additional revenue for the State.

Even that ambivalent 2000 Review was under no illusion as to the ideological provenance of any novel rationale. It referred to the “hardening of attitudes” which in the U.S. had led to the end of lone parent entitlement – and to “influential underclass theories”. There, some States have even introduced contraceptive implants for lone mothers claiming benefits – and defaulting fathers are named and shamed on local TV, as well as having their passports and driving-licences withdrawn.

Maintenance recovery measures now being prosecuted in Ireland signal an approach which seems headed (back) to a future where paid work is a punishment for illegitimacy and taxation is a penance for non-resident fatherhood.

A growing corpus of social policy and clinical research findings favour a child’s positive identification with the biological father. Not only, however, are we in danger of further stigmatizing “deadbeat dads” as “maintenance dodgers” – but Irish law gives a child no automatic right to have information about the father.

Neither is there any Constitutional recognition of the de facto family. The Supreme Court admits that this unit might possess certain rights in the context of guardianship applications – but even then only if the relationship had been “marriage like”.

Michael Rush lectures in the Department of Social Studies at University College, Dublin .