Speaking at the Glenties Summer School at
the weekend, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said it was the aim of his Government “to
create the environment where the innocence of children can develop naturally
through their formative years.” If he is serious about this, then the number one
thing his Government needs to do is promote and strengthen
marriage.

By any measure, marriage is the most
pro-child of all social institutions and that is why it has long received
special status and support. Only recently has the notion that it should receive
special status been called into question and attacked as ‘discriminatory’ by
‘family diversity’ proponents.

But an abundance of research clearly
demonstrates the benefits to a child of having a married mother and father. Here
is how Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur sum up the evidence in their highly
praised book, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What hurts, What
helps:

“If we were asked to design a system for
making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would probably come up with
something quite similar to the two-parent ideal..The fact that both parents have
a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the
parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that
child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the
child…”

This last point is crucial in the context of
the current debate about child protection. It is a fact that children are
proportionately far more likely to be abused outside the marital family
consisting of the child’s biological parents, than inside
it.

The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child
Abuse and Neglect, published by the US Government last year, comprehensively
proves this.

It shows that children who are raised by
their married biological parents are three and a half time less likely to
be abused or neglected compared with the next safest family, namely that
consisting of unmarried biological parents.

The least safe family by far consists of a
single mother living with a partner. This is almost 10 times less safe than the
married, biological family.

In Ireland the number of children being
raised outside of marriage now stands at more than one in four. It is one of the
highest levels in the developed world, according to the OECD. So if the
Government is truly concerned about child abuse, then it must do its utmost to
bring this figure down.

But will it, given that such a move would
almost certainly be widely condemned by ‘family diversity’
proponents?