It is an interesting week to be starting a blog about families, all families in Ireland today. Never before have families been under such enormous pressure. Never before have all of us, no matter what our circumstances, been dreading the announcement of a Budget as we anticipate the moment when Brian Lenihan stands up in the Dail next Wednesday.
And this evening the Civil Partnership Bill gets its second reading in the Dail. There’s talk of a conscience amendment - a get out clause if you will. The Bill itself is controversial, even among the LGBT community which has campaigned so long and so hard to get their relationships recognised.
Then there’s the fall-out from the various Catholic Church-child abuse reports, in which sadly and sickeningly the children in mostly two-parent families (in parishes) and in mostly one-parent families (locked up in the ‘care’ of the Church) were similarly assaulted, raped and destroyed by monsters whose sins were then covered up systematically.
Children are the common thread – children who are in the sights of our government at a time of undoubted crisis when they (children) undoubtedly did not cause one iota of the economic pain we find ourselves in…. children who outside of the family based on (heterosexual) marriage have no adequate legal protections….. children who were subject to vile abuse and subsequent cover-up and unimaginable pain for the rest of their lives. Children, a subject to which will we return, many times undoubtedly.
Frances, Dublin, December 3, 2009
