US Census data on poverty was released a few days ago. The prestigious Brookings Institute in Washington held a press conference to analyse the data, and Ron Haskins, a Senior Fellow of the Institute, drew attention to something that is equally relevant to Ireland, namely the link between poverty and female-headed households.

He told journalists: “Unless we can do something about poverty in female-headed families, we are not going to have major impacts on policy in the United States because the poverty rates among kids in female-headed families are so high – four or five times as high as in married couple families.

“And not only that but, unfortunately, the demographic trends in the United States are that we put more and more and more kids into female-headed families. And as a result of that we take them out of the situation, married couple family, where they would have much lower poverty rate.

“And so think about this. Even if we had successful poverty programs that actually did reduce the poverty rate, we still could have an increase in poverty because of the demographic trends [the increase in female-headed households]. So this is a very important piece of data to keep in mind when you’re thinking about what our policies for what poverty ought to be.”

All of Haskins’ analysis is applicable to Ireland. Female-headed families here are three times as likely to be in consistent poverty as the general population according to EU data. According to Census 2006, 21 percent of Irish children were being raised in female-headed households.

What this means is that until such time as Irish politicians and policy-makers realise that encouraging couple-headed families and specifically marriage is one of the best ways of fighting poverty, so long will the fight against poverty be akin to pushing the proverbial boulder up a hill.