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Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre 🏴 Maybe it is just because I live in the town and notice it more, but summer seems to have a habit of bringing tragedy to Drogheda's young. 

On a number of occasions over the past decade I have taken to TPQ to share thoughts on children losing their lives during the summer holiday season. Jill Amante, Daniel Roche and Gareth McGuirk have all found their way onto these pages, lives wrenched away from them in summers they should have been basking in, feeling life was eternal. Gill and Gareth both drowned while Daniel collided with a car when he was out cycling.

The latest to slip into that tunnel of darkness is Zara Murphy, a young soccer player who died on the pitch while turning out for Termonfeckin Celtic FC under-14s in a match against Glen Magic in the Louth School Girls League. She had previously played for Glen Magic. The weekend after her death all fixtures in the Louth School Girls League and in the North Eastern Football League were canceled as the world of local soccer came to terms with the loss. During the recent cup clash between Drogheda United and neighbours Dundalk, rivalry was set aside as the stadium applauded the youngster.

Zara's dream was to emulate and eventually bypass Katie McCabe, the captain of the Irish national women's squad and Arsenal stalwart.

Being a lover of soccer the death of a player so young concentrates the mind. While I was up at 3.30 this morning to send my own teenage son off to Greece with a huge fry as fuel, my thoughts went to the family of Zara who have seen her leave the house for the last time.

Her father, chair of the Louth Branch of the Irish Referee's Society, described his daughter as one in a million, but to them she was more than that: one in eight billion, wholly irreplaceable, the family's world ''turned upside down''.

We live in a world where the deaths of children is commonplace. For the past ten months we have been aware that not a day goes by without children being murdered by Israel. We strive not to to become fatigued by it nor inured to it when it happens.

There is simply nothing on this earth that can fill the vacuum caused by the death of a child. There is no coffin heavier, the weight of it never really dislodged from the shoulders of parents. When mothers and fathers pass a school at break time, it will not be the voices of the children playing they will hear but the silence of their own lost child.

Zara's funeral mass was held in the same church where only months earlier she had made her confirmation. The officiant observed:

Today is undoubtedly one of unspeakable sorrow and raises very difficult questions, questions that can't be answered; why do bad things happen to good people, why Zara. why such injustice?

There are answers but none that emotionally address the harsh questions that life often throws up. Bad things can happen to any of us at any time in life, but life still has to be lived rather than avoided, its risks faced. And when bad things happen, we try to learn from them so that we might ensure the next child can avoid them and be safer in a world where absolute certainty and total safety will always evade us.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Losing A Child On The Field Of Dreams

Jon Haidt @ After Babel ➖ and considered a worthwhile read by Christopher Owens. 

This is not just “Kids these days.”

From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” 

If that’s true, then the first half of the Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid?
1. The Case Against Me

Two responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting quotations from previous generations complaining about the behavior of youth. First, see this Twitter thread from Paul Fairie, titled A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled

Fairie includes this 1925 gem:

Remove the girl or boy of today from radio, the telephone, furnace heat, the automobile, the libraries, movies, and other forms of amusement and comfort––give them merely a jackknife and nature’s unchanging wonders for amusement, and how would they fare? 

Continue reading @ After Babel.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

Matt Treacy ✒ Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Inclusion and Youth Roderic O’Gorman has launched a report entitled Fathers and Children from Infancy to Middle Childhood which has been published by the Economic and Social Research Institute.


The report was written by Emer Smyth and Helen Russell, both adjunct professors at Trinity College, and draws on the substantial data base compiled under the Growing Up in Ireland survey. The report is based on research among fathers of children of the 2008 cohort who were aged 9 in 2017.

Both the authors and Minister O’Gorman have emphasised the need for greater state and employer support for parents, and, in particular, for fathers, to enable them to take more time off work to be with their young children. O’Gorman referred, in this context, to the government’s decision to extend paid parental leave from 2 to 7 weeks from 2022.

Of the original 8,032 families initially interviewed, the focus group was narrowed down to families where both parents were part of the household. However, of that cohort just 5,997 had both a father and a mother who were part of the household at all stages of the interview process. Which means that just over 25% of the households surveyed were headed by just one parent for all or a part of the process (p11.)

That closely matches the findings of the 2016 Census which enumerated 218,817 one parent families – 24.4% of all family units. Over 86% of these were headed by a mother. And yet the report devotes almost none of its more than 100 pages to discussing this issue – despite it being one of the key areas of family studies in most western societies.

In particular, the absence of a father has been identified as a key factor in the likelihood that the children of a single parent household, particularly boys, will engage in harmful or even criminal behaviour. A comprehensive 2020 review of the literature on this area was conducted by a team of leading Dutch academics.

The results suggest that growing up in single-parent families is associated with an elevated risk of involvement in crime by adolescents and that more research is needed to determine the effects of the different constituting events of single-parent families.

Interestingly, the Smyth/Russell report only contains one common reference with the list of 74 which formed part of the Dutch review. So perhaps, the relationship of the absence of a “traditional father” and social dysfunction is simply of no interest to Irish sociologists? This would make then pretty unique, I think.

They refer to another area not addressed on the basis that “Case numbers did not permit an analysis of households with lone fathers or same-sex couples.” (vii.) That may indeed be a valid limitation, but the numbers clearly do exist to allow for a detailed study of the impact of the absence of a father.

Instead, they appear intent on drawing in various ideological theories, in particular the almost universally unfavourable references to “fathers who held a more traditional view of their role.” It does not take too deep a reading of the evidence presented to see that the conclusion drawn – that such “traditional fathers” who perceived themselves to be mainly “a financial provider” – have lower levels of involvement with their children is because they are likely to be working and therefore not with their children for most of the day.

Indeed, they state this themselves: “Longer, paid work hours tend to reduce fathers’ participation in care tasks (and vice versa).” (p5)

Their focus is on introducing to the report subjective models of “gender role ideology” and fathers who “hold egalitarian views” and therefore spend more time with their children and doing housework (p.6)

The reality is that both the definition of “traditional father” and the time fathers spend with their children is a function of the time they spend at work, which leads many men to describe themselves as a “breadwinner.” (p23.)

They also recognise this when they state that: 

Compared to fathers working up to 40 hours, fathers working longer hours had reduced involvement in activities with the child while those who were not in paid employment had the highest involvement. (p26.) 

Seriously, this is not exactly ground-breaking research. And it certainly does not uphold any spurious ideological theories.

One suspects that this is solely used in order to bolster the theory that a man who according to their criteria is a “traditional father” constitutes some sort of negative influence on their own children (p58). And despite marginal statistical evidence from the survey to support this, most of that again appears to be related to a person’s position in the work force.

Interestingly the reported findings in Figure 2.1 show that most interactions with children are equally shared among mothers and fathers with the exceptions being bathing and getting up and dressed in the morning which are mostly done by the mother (p22.) Which is what one would expect if the father is more likely to leave the house early to work.

Perhaps if they had concentrated more on the role of “non-traditional” fathers the report might have provided some real findings of interest. There is no better definition perhaps of a “non-traditional” father than one who does not live with his biological children – or indeed perhaps may never have lived with, or perhaps even met his biological children. He might be more likely not to regard himself as a boring old trad “breadwinner” for his progeny.

These are clearly not a marginal factor given the fact that around 25% of Irish families with children are single parent households. The starkest statistic to emerge from the report – despite the fact that the concluding paragraph devotes just 5 lines of one page from 11 to “non-resident fathers” (p76) is that whereas 79% of children said they had a very good relationship with their father when he was living with them, that was only true of 65% of children whose father was not in the family home. And that too depended, according to the authors on a closeness based on staying over with their father and a non-conflictual relationship with their mother.

Given that the proportion of single parent families in Ireland has risen dramatically and was well above the then EU average of 14.1% in 2007, that is perhaps something that ought to have inspired some of this massive research effort?

This is especially true given that there is a substantial body of research which proves that across the western countries there is a very strong correlation between the crime committed by young males and their having been raised in a one parent family.

The fact that this report dwells on theory to explain certain marginal factors and ignores the elephant in the room when it comes to the relationship which over 20% of children have with their biological father and the wider social impact this has, suggests that they already knew what they wanted to find.

The conclusion drawn by the authors and Minister O’Gorman that there need to be more state support for working fathers is all very well and good. However, it is pretty much irrelevant to those 25% of so of fathers who are not there anyway. And even less help to those children who have to deal with the consequences of that.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

ESRI Report On Families Ignores Elephant In The Corner

James Kearney ✒ Beside the graves of my comrades, Bobby Sands, Kieran Doherty, Joe Mc Donnell, Mairead Farrell and Brendan O Callaghan a young boy laughs. 


He is unaware of the sacrifice that has been made, the huge price that has been paid, the long road of rags and sorrows which have led to this place.

He can not hear the sound of gunfire, the bullets cutting through skin, the moans and cries from the dying for their mothers. He can not hear the steel doors slamming, the women weeping for their sons and daughters, the pangs of hunger in the night.

He can not hear the thud of the distant explosion, the ticking time bomb, the front door being kicked in, the screech of a Saracen armoured car. He can not hear the dying gasps of men on hunger strike, he can not see their glazed eyes.

Instead, all he hears is the birds singing, the music on a gentle breeze. He hears the sound of an ice cream van, or a bee humming, or catches a glimpse of a sparrow hawk in flight.

His dreams are now filled with sugar plum fairies, not with smoke and horror, as only mine were. His laughter has become my revenge and the revenge of my lost brothers, my brothers in arms.

⏩ James Kearney is a former Blanketman.

Our Revenge Will Be The Laughter Of Our Children

Anthony McIntyre reflects on the death of a Drogheda teen.

Goodbye to you my trusted friend
We've known each other since we were nine or ten
Together we've climbed hills and trees
Learned of love and ABC's
Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees
Goodbye my friend it's hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
Pretty girls are everywhere
Think of me and I'll be there

- Terry Jacks


We can almost sense it coming. Each time the school holidays arrive I grip my teenage son and talk to him about the dangers lurking out there but which are masked by the haze of a shimmering sun. He turned 14 this morning, so perhaps I am more emotionally driven because of the day that is in it. Before he came of age I did the same with my daughter, who is now an adult and even less inclined to listen to advice if she feels it might erode her autonomy to make her own decisions.  Having instilled in her the right to choose and have no one else steal the choice from her, I can not fault her for her stance.

A parent no matter how much they try can never be sure where their children are or what they get up once they head off with their friends. Even at home it is a difficult enough task in the modern technological world where internet gives them immediate access to their friends. And when young friends get together, parental control is shunted off to the margins.  The lure of adventure, the existential need for excitement, ineluctably draws them to a variety of unsupervised thrill centres: railway lines, isolated pools, high trees, under age drinking and illicit drugs -  there is no shortage.

Our children don't need to be addicted to risk to end up in potentially fatal situations: like the biblical thief in the night, death comes unexpectedly. Just that, when they are home at night parents can relax. It is not in the darkness of night but during the light of bright summer days that parental anxiety zooms upwards. In recent years Drogheda has lost some of its children to summer accidents. Young Gareth McGuirk and Daniel Roche, both 13, are names that have featured on in TPQ in circumstances no one wished for. This time tragedy befell 14-year-old Jill Amante from Aston Village on the northern outskirts of the town. 

Jill Amante was a child of this town, a full life ahead of her, tragically snatched away. She had been swimming in the summer sun with friends at Seapoint beach near Termonfeckin. Her family are said to have come to Ireland from Nigeria, and like other Africans who have made the trip hoped to make Drogheda their home, not an early grave for their daughter. 

Local councillor Ged Nash summed up for many when he said:

It’s an awful thing to happen to a family. The idea that a 14-year-old girl can leave home and not come back is traumatising for everybody … It is an unspeakable tragedy and we can only imagine what the family is going through at the moment.

Jill will be laid to rest, Drogheda will mourn the loss of yet another of its youth, amidst mothers and fathers “hugging their children tighter” and the town will return to normal in the terrible knowledge that the sun has set on a young life but will rise again in the morning and will again beckon the young to danger. Last year two young rugby playing teenagers, Jack Kineally and Shay Moloney went swimming in a lake with friends. Neither their strength or stamina, nor the herculean efforts of their young friends could save them. Only a pre-emptive caution can assist there. As we mourn the death of a child of this town, we could do worse than caution our children until we weary of it. And then caution them again.

Drogheda Loses Another Of Its Children

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