The Changing ‘Irish’ Family
copyright Linda
Connolly - do not cite in written work or on television/radio interviews without acknowledging the source
This blog provides a summary of the contents of my new edited collection entitled:
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As recent debates about the Children and Family Relationships Bill (2014) [view the bill here ] and the forthcoming referendum on same sex marriage have demonstrated, ‘the
family’ occupies a core position in Irish culture and society. A number of historians,
demographers, anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, have investigated
a wide range of issues in relation to the central role of the family in Ireland
over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as, the deeply
embedded relationship that existed between family, kinship and community in
rural Ireland traditionally; class differences, poverty and emigration; gender
inequality and women’s role in the household; illegitimacy; reproduction and
fertility; domestic violence; childhood and child welfare; religion; and
sexuality). In more recent years,
scholars have turned their attention to mapping and understanding the so-called
late but rapid transformation and modernization of family life that is said to
have begun in the 1980s and culminated in the 21st century.
The
family has also occupied a core position in policy and public debates about the
‘common good’ and national identity formation in Ireland, since the foundation
of the State. The family, for instance, was afforded privileged mention and
protection in the Irish Constitution of 1937. Under Article 41.1 the State promises
to ‘protect the Family’ and recognises the family as having ‘inalienable and
imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.’ Women
were accorded a very specific familial role in the State’s legal framework and
the Constitution still states: ‘woman by her life within the home gives to the
State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’
Given the
pivotal role of the family in the social structure and religious ethos of the
State historically, it is not surprising that it is still at the centre of
social and political debate in the 21st century. Various individuals and interest groups in
Irish society frequently argue for the preservation of what they view as the
ideal form of marriage and family while others welcome and promote the
emergence of more diverse and alternative family forms. Conflicting interest groups such as the
Catholic Church, the women's movement, gay and lesbian movement, new right
campaigns and institutes, media commentators and political actors continue to
stimulate a vibrant traditional family values versus family
diversity/libertarian discourse. The
prospect of a referendum on same sex marriage in 2015 and continued
controversies surrounding reproduction and childbirth (including in relation to
abortions, redress for symphysiotomy victims and ongoing issues concerning mother
and baby homes) will undoubtedly unleash further robust debate in this arena.
Irish
society was considered to be a demographic outlier for much of the twentieth
century and to have embraced more secular, European-wide values in personal and
intimate life late. Divorce, for instance, was not legalized until it
was narrowly passed by referendum in 1995 and reproductive rights remains a contentious
issue in Ireland in the aftermath of a clause inserted in the constitution in
1983 to protect the right to life of ‘the unborn.’ At the same time, by the 21st
century Ireland had a relatively high non-marital birth rate compared to a
number of other European countries, women with young children were
participating in the labour force in rapidly increasing numbers, homosexuality
was decriminalized, cohabitation was in evidence alongside conventional marriage,
contraception was legalized and accessible, and marital separation legislation
had been introduced. At face value, it appeared that the family was undergoing
a process of rapid transformation and modernization and gradually aligning with
more secular European values and trends.
Ireland
represents an interesting and challenging case study in the context of twenty-first
century family life. A key contention in the
‘Irish’ Family volume, the contents of which are summarized in below, is that Irish family patterns today are clearly converging closely to
European trends in some arenas (for instance, the rate of non-marital
births and the crude marriage rate which was traditionally lower in Ireland for
much of the twentieth century has converged towards the EU average) but
maintaining a distinctive trend in others (the divorce rate remains low
and the overall fertility rate is comparatively higher, for instance). There is
therefore a complex tension between traditional values and modernity in Irish
family life and in intimate relationships more generally understood.
Locating the ‘Irish’ Family
The
middle decades of the twentieth century have been described as a ‘golden age’
for marriage and the nuclear family in Europe and the developed world. More
people were married and married at a younger age than at any other time in the
modern era. However, by the 1960s,
previously accepted definitions of family, kinship, marriage and reproduction
through the lens of the nuclear family were fundamentally challenged by the
proliferation of more diverse expressions of family and personal life in
western societies and the weakening of marriage as the primary route into
family formation, sexual activity and procreation. The steep rise in the European divorce and
re-marriage rates set in motion from the 1960s on have produced new complex new
sets of kinship relationships in the 21st century, such as
one-parent families (which are mostly headed by women) and ‘reconstituted’ or ‘blended’
families. Official statistics show that
increasing numbers of children in the West now adapt to and live with step
parents who may, for instance, also have previous children of their own and
future children with their parent, and post-divorce childhood has been coined
an intrinsic feature of twenty-first century western families. Likewise, recent
decades have witnessed a greater acceptance of gay partnerships and same sex
families, evident in Ireland for instance in the decriminalization of
homosexuality in 1993 and in the passing of the Civil Partnership and
Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010. New reproductive technologies, involving
donor sperm and egg or surrogacy for example are also fundamentally challenging
and changing the accepted relationship between family, biology and
reproduction. Heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction no longer have
a monopoly on family formation therefore and increasing numbers of children are
born outside of marriage or live with non-biological step parents. In some
Northern European societies, cohabitation is an established alternative to
marriage and more children are born outside than inside marriage. A further key
trend is that, in general, the overall fertility rate in Europe has declined
steeply in recent decades resulting in an ageing population and insufficient
population replacement rate. Childlessness and one-person households also
feature increasingly in European data. A search for new ideas and perspectives
on twenty-first century families has accordingly emerged.
Where
does Ireland fit in relation to these trends? The ‘Irish’ Family volume presents new original research into a
range of family practices, trends and dynamics. Chapter one of the ‘Irish’ Family draws on extensive
empirical data to analyse family trends in Ireland and locate them in a
comparative-historical and comparative-European context. What has changed over time in Ireland and how
does Ireland compare with other European societies in relation to key, recent
trends in family life? For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was
considered a demographic outlier in Europe and the situation was quite
distinctive. The key features of Ireland’s social structure up to the 1960s
were a class structure dominated by a large agricultural population, with the
majority were employed on ‘the land’; a rural profile and ethos; economic
protectionism in the mid century; high levels of emigration and overall
population decline; and distinctive patterns in family and demography that
broadly encompassed a late age of marriage, a high rate of non marriage and a
high marital fertility rate resulting in distinctly large families. A climate of censorship regarding sexual and
intimate matters and social control, resulting in harsh treatment for women who
had children outside of marriage and for children born into categories
categorized as ‘deviant,’ was a further dominant feature of twentieth century
Ireland.
However,
by the 1960s new trends that coincided with economic modernization policies and
radicalizing social movements were emerging in Irish society, including younger
age of marriage, longer formal schooling of marriage partners and greater
educational opportunities for women, and the increased involvement of the
welfare state and the State in the family. In particular, an active and radical
women’s movement had mobilized extensively by the 1970s and questioned
traditional family values as well as women’s constitutionally defined primary
role in society as mothers in the home. The right of women to access
contraception and to engage in productive work outside as well as inside the
home was vigorously campaigned for. For some commentators, the family itself
was considered the core site of women’s oppression in society with marriage
invariably considered a form of domestic and sexual slavery, in light of the
resistance to legal contraceptives and lack of opportunities for women outside
the home. ‘The Irish family’ was about to enter into a period of significant
social change and radical questioning, and analysts started to assess whether or
not Irish family patterns were radically departing from tradition and
converging closer to European norms or continuing to follow a distinctive path?
In
order to address these issues, a detailed overview of recent changing trends in
marriage, divorce, cohabitation, reproduction, sexualities, lone parenthood and
gender in Ireland is provided in chapter one of the ‘Irish’ Family volume. Finola Kennedy has aptly stated that: ‘the
story of family change in Ireland is both unique, and at the same time, similar
to that of many other countries.’ The available data on Irish family life
presents a mixed picture. In some arenas, current trends are corresponding more
closely with European averages but in other areas the trends in Ireland
continue to be distinct. In relation to divorce, cohabitation, the number of
children living in one-parent households and the overall fertility rate,
statistical trends in Ireland are not fully in line with European averages.
Marital separation has undoubtedly increased in recent decades but Ireland
still has one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe. Alternatives to
traditional marriage (such as cohabitation and civil partnership) have increased
among the younger generations especially but they are not even remotely close
to replacing marriage as a basis for family formation, as has been the trend in
some other European countries.
The
fertility rate in Ireland does, however, remain the highest in the EU but by
Irish standards the birth rate it represents a historical low. Irish women are
on average now having 2 children (in the 1970s the average was 4) but the fact
that Irish mothers are currently the oldest in Europe suggests that the upper
fertility rate in evidence is more a reflection of the postponing of having
children to later in the life cycle than being due to a greater propensity
among Irish women to have large numbers of children in common with previous
generations. In other areas, such as non-marital births and the crude marriage
rate, the figures in Ireland are approximating very closely to European averages.
The marriage rate in Ireland is not particularly high but marriage has not
diminished either. In the case of non-marital births, the rate in Ireland (34%
of all births occur outside marriage; however, the figure is approximating to
50% in the main cities of Dublin, Cork and Limerick) is much higher than in
several other countries with very low rates (such as Greece where the 2011 figure
is 7.4%). But, it is not exceeding the European average (38%) or approximating
close to the upper ranges in this category (in the region of 60% of all
children are now born outside marriage in total in Iceland, 55% is the figure in
France and 54% in Sweden, for example).
In the case of
single parents who are not cohabiting or in a relationship, the current
situation in Ireland is noteworthy. In the past, illegitimacy was utterly frowned
upon and stigmatized and the UK became a refuge for Irish unmarried mothers to
the extent they were afforded the label ‘PFI’s’ (Pregnant from Ireland) by
social services. Adoption rates were high as a consequence of unmarried mothers
concealing their pregnancies, often with the assistance of the Catholic Church
and mother and baby homes. In Ireland, however, while the largest proportion of
households today is made up of couple households with children, with single
adults with no children second, Ireland at the same time has a much higher
percentage of children living in lone parent households than in much of the
rest of Europe. Given the fact that the vast majority of lone parents in
Ireland are women, this distinct trend and existing data suggests that women
(particularly women of low educational attainment) are putting motherhood
before marriage to a much greater extent than their European counterparts and
are cohabiting less – which is a trend that requires further investigation.
The
idea of postmodernism implies that we can no longer deal with a single entity
called 'the family'. Yet, the findings presented in chapter one of the book
suggest that the situation is more complex in the Irish case. Traditional forms
of family life (such as, the life-long, nuclear family based on heterosexual
marriage and the persistence of an unequal gender based division of labour in
the home that is documented in contemporary research) continue and sustain
alongside new, more diverse family forms and households emerging in
contemporary Ireland (such as one parent families, ‘reconstituted’ families
post marital separation/divorce, cohabitees and same sex couples). Taken together the new forms of family and
intimate life that are now evident in Ireland fundamentally challenge the
notion that there is only one way to be married, intimate and committed to
another person in the Irish context. At
the same time, these developments have not even remotely replaced the
predominance of conventional family forms and trends. These themes are developed in further detail,
in the subsequent chapters, each of which presents new and original research.
The 'Irish' Family Text
The
importance of class and socio-economic background as a determining feature of
family formation in Ireland, historically, is advanced in chapter two of the book.
Utilising census information, Carmel Hannan focuses on the role of class
differences in marriage and fertility patterns in Ireland, over the 1926-1991
period. This chapter demonstrates how the study of differential marriage and
fertility patterns is particularly important for understanding the Irish
demographic experience historically. Despite striking changes in family
dynamics in this period, social class was a powerful predictor of marriage
chances and fertility patterns. One of the key issues addressed is the degree
to which larger social structural changes in Ireland in this period, such as
the decline in family farming which was a dominant feature of the social
structure, resulted in changing patterns of marriage and fertility over the
course of the twentieth century.
In
chapter three, quantitative data from a number of sources, including the Census
of Population, the Growing up in Ireland survey and the European Values Study,
is drawn upon by Tony Fahey to question whether the so-called transformation of
family life in more recent decades has demolished traditional family values and
patterns. The analysis suggests that family life in Ireland most certainly experienced
rapid change in the period between the McGee judgement on contraception handed
down by the Supreme Court in 1973 and the divorce referendum held in 1995, but
subsequently entered into a more stable period. From the mid 1990s on, it is
argued, it is possible to talk of a post-revolutionary settling down of family
patterns and what was new and unsettling in the 1980s became ‘normal’ in the
2000s. Fundamentally, expectations that the structure and convention of the
past would give way to endless diversity and fluidity in family life have not
been fulfilled in the Irish case.
The key argument
made is that family patterns in the first decade of the new millennium were
certainly different in many ways from what went before but they are still
patterned in ways that often carry strong echoes of the past and are not
subject to continuous rapid change. Family relationships today are therefore
more durable and stable than is often supposed. Some diversity in family forms
is evident but the continued influence of traditional sources of
differentiation, particularly socio-economic status, is striking. In
particular, it is argued that where fluidity and diversity are most evident in Irish
families, the causes lie in poor access to resources needed to underpin stable
family life rather than in decline of family stability as a social ideal.
In
chapter four, Tom Inglis contends that although there have been extensive
changes in its structure and varieties; ‘the family’ remains the core cultural
institution of Irish society. Statistically speaking two-thirds of Irish
families are based on a married couple in their first marriage and three in every
four children live with two married parents. The traditional family, based on
marriage and children, is therefore not even remotely ‘disappearing’
statistically despite the existence of more liberal legislation on divorce,
illegitimacy, homosexuality and reproductive rights in recent decades. The analysis
in this chapter also draws on findings from research based on 100 in-depth
qualitative interviews conducted around Ireland during 2008–2009, which
captured family life as lived experience. The study found that most individuals
are socialised within traditional nuclear family units and develop their
identities, sense of self and understanding of the meaning of life primarily in
terms of what happened within their family. The ontological sense of self in
the majority of individuals interviewed, the way they see and understand
themselves, was developed and maintained in terms of relations with parents and
siblings.
The data
also reflects patterns of relations between individuals, parents and
siblings and revealed how patterns of bonding developed in one generation are
maintained in the next. Despite family life being subject to long-term
processes of change (including globalisation, mobility and more relaxed
attitudes to sexuality), which have loosened the bonds that bind individuals to
religion and communities, this chapter concludes that most Irish people are
still bound to family. The family is still considered the centre of intimate,
personal relations through which people create and sustain meaning on a daily
basis.
The next
two chapters focus on gender issues. Pat
O’Connor’s analysis draws on a national one in ten random sample of 4,100 texts
written by Irish young people (aged 10-12 and 14-17 years) and on a more
in-depth analysis of a number of sub-samples of this data (including 224 texts
written by those aged 14-17 years). Focusing on themes such as, relationships,
fateful moments, search for authenticity, life plans, life styles, and public
discourses, it is shown that gender (with a small number of exceptions) was
an unrecognised but crucially important framework in shaping young people’s
lives. The data is drawn upon to demonstrate how these trends are linked
to young people’s construction of family life, in particular.
Many of the themes in the young people’s texts were echoed or
reinforced in the large scale Growing Up
in Ireland study, led by Trinity College Dublin. In this study, nine year
old girls were slightly more likely than their male counterparts to see the
family as most important in making them happy, while the boys were much more
likely than girls to put sport first. The overwhelming majority of both boys
and girls said that they would talk to their mother about a problem, but only
between a half and two thirds said that they would talk to their father about
it (with the boys being marginally more likely to do this than the girls). The gendered construction of confiding was echoed in the study. Nine year old boys were also more likely than
girls to play sport almost every day and to spend time playing video games,
with these life styles seen as reflecting underlying gendered personality
traits: boys being seen as ‘more boisterous, active and getting into
troublesome situations’, and girls as ‘gentler, more sensitive and calmer’. Thus effectively the social construction of
boys and girls was seen as ‘natural.’
Lisa Smyth
explores the relationship between motherhood, ethnicity, class and religion in
Chapter six. Drawing on material from two studies of mothers in Belfast, one
inner city working class, the other suburban middle class, this chapter
examines the routine ways in which mothers juggle the needs of family,
neighbourhood and community, as they take on and creatively remake this central
familial role in a divided society. This chapter argues that the location of
family life at the intersection of a variety of social institutions (class,
neighbourhood, religion, education, employment, domestic work and childcare,
and ethno-nationality) demands creative forms of action from women as they go about
their everyday lives and attempt to create a safe and more inclusive
environment for their children across the different religious communities in
Belfast.
Chapters seven and eight both address the role of children
in family life. In recent years, the study of childhood has shifted from the
prevailing interpretation of children as passive dependents on adults to
children as social actors, in their own right. Chapter seven, by Ruth Geraghty,
Jane Gray and David Ralph, focuses on the relationship between children and
grandparents from a 'child’s-eye' perspective, examining changing patterns of
contact and care between grandparents and grandchildren from the 1930s to the
present. Drawing on two major archived qualitative datasets, the analysis
brings retrospective life history narratives into dialogue with interviews in
order to unpack continuity and change in young children’s experience and
explore quality of relationship with their grandparents.
In contemporary Ireland, the decline of co-residence between
children and their grandparents is associated with growing economic
independence of parents. However, a considerable proportion of Irish parents
rely on grandparents to provide childcare, particularly as mothers participate
in the labour force. The study found continuity in the warm relationships that
had developed between children and their grandparents across the birth cohorts
studied. However, significant transformations in household and family contexts
and in childhood have given rise to changes in the texture of the relationship
between grandchildren and their grandparents. Firstly, as grandchildren are
less likely to spend extended periods of time with a grandparent, parents have
greater power to act as gatekeepers between the generations. Secondly, changes
in the nature of childhood mean that the time children spend with their
grandparents has become more domesticated. Contemporary children’s experiences
of being cared for in the private space of a grandparent’s home contrast with
adult memories of exploring the wider world in the company of grandparents; in
the past children 'tagged along' as their grandparent went about the daily
activities of working and visiting.
In chapter eight, Caitríona Ní Laoire introduces migration
into the analysis of childhood in Ireland. This chapter explores the role of
family and kin connectedness in the migration experiences and belonging
strategies of children in returning
Irish migrant families. The analysis is based on in-depth research with
children who moved to Ireland with their return migrant parents during the
Celtic Tiger economic boom period (1995-2008). Return migrants and their children accounted
for the vast majority of immigrants during the Celtic Tiger era. The data
presented points to the ways in which family connectedness facilitates
belonging to local and national/ethnic collectivities for some return migrants,
and conversely, can work to exclude those who do not have access to such
connections. Children play a central
role in shaping and re-shaping social and familial networks, actively involved
in the everyday doing and re-doing of family and kinship. As they negotiate
belongings and identities from complex positions in Irish society as simultaneously
children, migrants and returnees, return-migrant children’s unique perspectives
highlight the complex relationships between family, power, locality and
belonging in contemporary Irish society.
Rebecca
Chiyoko King-O’Riain, in chapter nine, also deals with migration and belonging
in Irish family life. With 10% of the current Irish population now not born in
Ireland, the number of mixed Irish/non-Irish households is on the rise. The
core questions addressed in this chapter are how do interracial, intercultural,
interfaith, multilingual and often transnational families in Ireland create and
sustain senses of belonging both within and across nation state borders? What
experiences have these types of families had in Ireland? What do their
experiences tell us about the changing nature and diversification of families
who reside in Ireland, but whom increasingly have emotional ties across the
world?
The data
in this chapter comes from in depth interviews with mixed international couples
living in the Republic of Ireland. 40 interviews were conducted through English
in 2010-2011 with same sex and heterosexual couples (ages 26-60) and adult
children, from Ireland, France, Canada, US, UK, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka,
Poland, Zimbabwe, and China living in Ireland, the UK and the US. Interviewees
in Ireland were residing in: Cork, Kildare, Galway, Tipperary, Dublin and the
surrounds.
This
chapter finds that while there is an increasing number of mixed international
families in Ireland where one partner is Irish and the other is not, legal,
social and political acceptance of these newer Irish citizens is slower to
change. This could be seen as part of the growing global stratification of citizenship
and belonging where the formal status of citizenship does not ensure acceptance
or belonging to the nation. On the other hand, continued assertions by mixed
Irish/non-Irish families of their ‘right’ to be Irish continues to challenge
the notion that in order to be considered truly Irish one must be ‘WHISC’ –
white, heterosexual, Irish-born, settled, and Catholic. Fundamentally, the chapters in this section
demonstrate how important it is to deconstruct, problematise and rethink what
the ‘Irish’ family category actually means.
Chapter
ten also examines migration and turns our attention to sexualities. In this
chapter, Róisín Ryan-Flood discusses how researchers have tended to understand
lesbian and gay kinship to be distinctive and have argued that alienation from
families of origin led many lesbians and gay men to form new relational
networks, or ‘families we choose’, where relationships are based on choice,
rather than legal kinship (marriage) or blood ties. More recently, however, lesbian
and gay partnerships have become formally recognized in many countries through civil
partnership or gay marriage, including in Ireland. In addition, a lesbian and
gay ‘baby boom’ is very much in evidence.
This
chapter explores the experiences of Irish lesbian and gay people by drawing on
two recent research projects, including a study of lesbian motherhood in
Ireland, and research on Irish lesbian and gay people living in London. The
findings presented suggest that the Irish lesbian and gay people in these
studies often remain committed to families of origin and go to considerable lengths
to maintain connections with them after coming out. In contrast to research
that emphasises alienation, it is suggested that dominant discourses of ‘the
family’ underline its importance for Irish lesbian and gay people who carry out
considerable emotional labour with their families. The research suggests that
having a child often reinvigorated relationships with parents and siblings.
Emigration underlined the importance of maintaining ties ‘back home’. The
centrality of family in participants’ interview narratives suggests the
importance of culturally and geographically situated research. The chapter also
considers some of the implications of the research findings for wider
understandings of ‘family,’ intimacy, identity and belonging.
In the
final chapter, Ciarán McCullagh addresses the profound impact technology is
having on twenty-first century family life, family politics and family
relationships. Chapter eleven demonstrates how research on the adaptation of
technology emphasises the speed at which new forms of communication technology
have been taken up by users and incorporated into the routines of everyday life
where their use is now considered ‘normal’. This chapter explores the impact of
these technologies on social relations by analysing both the perpetual contact
that such technologies allow and the implications of their perpetual use at the
level of everyday life for contacting ones family and friends.
This
final chapter argues that at one level the technologies have facilitated the
micro-co-ordination and communication on which significant aspects of
contemporary family life depends. At another level, however, issues of
surveillance and privacy arise. Certain forms of new technologies (such as,
mobile phones) facilitate increased parental supervision but others (Facebook,
for example) allow the creation of a private realm secure from parental
oversight, evident in the growth of a mobile youth culture and the intensification
of what media researchers have labelled ‘bedroom culture’. The text ends therefore by asking deeply
challenging questions about the role of online communication on the very fabric
of our existence and quality of life as intimate citizens and as family
members.
