The Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, has criticised as "an inversion of history" the assumption that a family was doing the State a favour by caring for a relative.
In a review in the current issue of the Furrow magazine, Mr Bruton says childcare is becoming a profession "rather than something that people are expected to do spontaneously because of love". Care of the elderly was being professionalised.
"The State is taking over the responsibilities of the family. Family members even expect to be paid by the State for performing caring responsibilities towards other members because they are `saving the State money' by doing so.
"The underlying assumption seems to be that the state of nature was one where the State performed all the caring functions, and that any caring now provided by members of a family is a sort of favour done to the State. This is an inversion of history. The truth is that families existed before the State was ever dreamed of.
"The State was created to serve families, not the reverse. Each step away from this norm may be individually justified, but the cumulative effect weakens the bonds that keep families together. This has unknowable consequences for future generations," Mr Bruton said.
The difficulty was that "children and the elderly get in the way of economic man and economic woman", he said, observing that "the way people treat their elderly is one of the surest guides to the level of a civilisation".
He expressed concern about growing evidence of physical abuse of elderly people in caring institutions and also by their own families. "This is one of the least reported forms of abuse, and yet it is quite prevalent," he said.
Reflecting on those people "who do good things for free", he said their work was ignored in calculations of gross domestic product. So also was the work of a parent caring for a child in the home.
"Irish society suffers from a cash illusion. We only appear to have an increased GDP because so much work in Ireland is now being paid for, where it was previously done for free," he said. And "so long as we continue using the language of GDP we will be drawn inexorably to the wrong conclusions" about national well-being, he said.
"We live life in compartments, and the work compartment is getting larger and larger, while all other compartments are diminished," he said. "We have designed an urban Ireland that prevents natural communities being created across class lines. We have also designed it so that people commute such long distances that they have no time or energy left for building a community in their own locality," he said.
Mr Bruton was reviewing the book, Are We Forgetting Some- thing? Our Society in the New Millennium, a collection of essays arising from a conference held in Ennis, Co Clare, last year.
