I find it upsetting that the right in the United States, and indeed the Catholic right here in Ireland, have succeeded in making "family" sound like a bad word, writes Garret FitzGerald
It is difficult any longer speak of "family values" without qualifying the phrase in some way so as to avoid being identified as intolerant - and we all know the special meaning attributed to "family solidarity" in Ireland.
Mind you, intolerance is not confined to the extreme right; there is an element of intolerance on the left also - which has made it equally difficult to espouse liberalism in social matters without being identified with a new, aggressively negative attitude that some have adopted towards much that is good and worthwhile in society.
The dilemma thus created for many people of goodwill is quite acute. In sitting down to write on this subject I am conscious of the fact that even if I choose my words with great care, I am liable to offend people at both ends of this particular ideological spectrum.
Let me try to explain what I feel about some of these issues. First of all, I believe that nothing in life is more important or more worthwhile than the procreation and the upbringing of children in a way designed to enable them to enjoy a happy and fulfilled life as generous, positive and humane members of our future society. Most of those who engage in this process of family formation derive from it life-long happiness of a kind not easily achieved through any other human activity.
This process involves, of course, much sacrifice on the part of parents. That sacrifice has been willingly made by some six thousand generations of modern man, because as human beings we are genetically programmed to make it.
However, the breaking of the link between sexual activity and procreation through contraception, and also abortion, has increasingly operated to weaken and offset the impact of this genetic programming factor, with the result that most women in today's Ireland, as elsewhere, seek at least to postpone childbearing.
As a result, almost 60 per cent of Irish births are now to women during the second half of their childbearing cycle - whereas as recently as 20 years ago this proportion was less than 40 per cent, and would have been very much lower but for unintended late pregnancies.
These developments have also operated to limit the size of families, and it seems possible that the proportion of Irish women avoiding child-bearing altogether may eventually rise from below one in 12 to, perhaps, one in four.
Some indication of the impact of these recent demographic developments in Ireland can be gleaned from data about the proportion of Irish households that include children. Since 1980 this proportion has fallen from almost one-half to less than one-third. And the proportion of households with children that have more than two children has also fallen by the same amount.
Another new development has been the emergence of a much higher number of broken marriages. The number of women under the age of 50 recorded as separated or divorced trebled to almost 50,000 between 1986 and 2002. However, this probably exaggerates considerably the number of families in which children have suffered seriously from marital discord.
First of all, some of these marriage breakdowns will have been to couples without children. Second, part of this statistical increase may reflect a greater willingness to admit to marriage breakdown rather than an increase in breakdown itself. And third, some marriages that have not ended in this way may nevertheless have involved a negative relationship between the spouses that adversely affected children just as much as marriage breakdown.
Because of greater public acceptance of cohabitation without marriage, this now creates a less serious problem for the children of such unions than does marriage breakdown, although it remains the case that such relationships prove less stable than marriage. While our Constitution recognises only the family based on marriage, the reality is that cohabiting couples with children are, of course, families, and it is wrong to deploy "family values" against them. Legal provision needs to be made to deal with problems such as property-sharing and transfer in stable heterosexual and homosexual relationships, although this is not a simple matter, as Dr John Mee has recently explained on this page.
However, all this does not mean that the State is not entitled to give particular recognition to marriage if it has reason to believe that this will help to promote stability in heterosexual relationships.
Those who propound what they see as liberal values should avoid pushing their claims in a way that is unnecessarily provocative to others. In particular, both sides of the debate on abortion should be far less aggressive towards each other. The truth is that this has been found to be a difficult issue in every country. The reason for this is simple: the need to decide where a line is to be drawn between the "morning-after" pill on the one hand and the killing of viable foetuses, or even babies, at the other end of the process.
In a referendum in the 1990s the Irish legislature and electorate found it necessary to draw this line at a different point from that advocated by the Roman Catholic Church.
Those who simplistically claim an unqualified "woman's right to choose" fail to recognise this reality. On the other side, there has been a reluctance to admit that our opposition to abortion in Ireland has a real downside in the form of later abortions in Britain, and humanly it is hard to argue that abortions are equally abhorrent regardless of the stage at which they take place. One cannot but feel that late abortions involving foetuses approaching the point of viability are far more unacceptable than action taken at the very start of the process.
Anti-abortionists should recognise that some of those who do not go the whole way with them on the issue of when human life begins are acting in good faith. The violent attitudes and unbridled language of some of the more extreme opponents of abortion have alienated many who are not pro-abortion - thus damaging their cause.
Tolerance and respect for the view of others are more necessary in respect of human relations than perhaps anywhere else.