Some of the speakers at the Dublin Castle conference on vulnerable families in Europe, surprisingly admitted that the trends towards more single parent families, more cohabitation, fewer, later and more unstable families were not positive. Unfortunately they were fatalistic as to whether anything could be done about this.

The conference was sponsored by EU organisation COFACE (Confederation of Family Organisations in the European Union) and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

Two speakers in particular, Juan Menendez Valdes and Professor Juho Härkönen, accepted that lone parent families tended to be more vulnerable than other family forms.

Given that COFACE professes studied and perfect neutrality as to family structure, this was quite novel.

However, when the question as to the policy implications of this arose, the party line was clear: nothing can or should be done to address the flight from marriage across Europe.

Professor Härkönen addressed the topic as part of his talk. He said that any efforts to promote marriage or reduce family instability were unlikely to work.

Instead, he recommended that governments focus their efforts on dealing with the economic consequences of these trends.

His evidence for this gloomy prognosis? He said he had looked at efforts made in the US to reform divorce laws and support marriage had not as yet borne enough fruit to be conclusive.

This seems a rather sweeping conclusion to draw from such a limited evidence base. Divorce law reform in the US is anything but a widespread or long established trend. It seems a little hasty to write it off just yet.

The fact is that few governments have done anything to positively promote marriage, or to address any of the causes of its decline. Therefore there is no basis for simply dismissing efforts to promote marriage.

Compare this approach to the attitude taken to poverty reduction measures. The progress made in reducing poverty and social exclusion after decades of government programmes and literally billions of euro in social welfare spending hardly rises to modest.

Yet very few, if any, of those so prepared to blithely dismiss the prospect of government action to promote marriage would ever dream of suggesting that anti-poverty programmes are a waste of time or resources.

Where the will is there, governments will plough time, investment and effort into a problem. The will, plainly, is not there when it comes to tackling the parlous state of marriage.