I’ve written before about Ireland’s unknown knowns, our singular talent for wilful absent-mindedness. We have been very good at rendering invisible what is in front of our eyes. And we have not lost the knack. We’re doing it now with a reality to which our history should make us especially sensitive: hunger.
At the start of this century, one child in every six growing up in Ireland sometimes went to bed hungry because there was not enough food in the house. Now, when (to adopt Bertie Ahern’s neologism) the boom is even boomer, this mortifying statistic has changed radically. We’ve managed to get it up almost to one child in every five.
And for children in the poorest third of families, we’re closing in on one in four. According to the comprehensive Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study published last week, 15 per cent of Irish kids in the lowest income families sometimes went to bed hungry in 2002. Twenty years later (2022 is the latest year of the analysis), that metric had risen to 24 per cent.
If you missed this news, you probably shouldn’t blame yourself. The HBSC report got extensive coverage for its findings on whether children were feeling “low” or drinking alcohol, smoking dope or using condoms if they had sex. The data on hunger was largely ignored, meriting at best a glancing reference. It is not hard to understand why: it induces a kind of cognitive dissonance. It does not fit in the frame of contemporary Irish reality.
At a time when the boom is even boomer, this statistic should mortify us
Event guide: Pulp, Beyond the Pale, Cork Midsummer and other best things to do in Ireland this week
Netanyahu’s big lie is that ‘They’ are not really the same species as ‘Us’
Letters to the Editor May 28th: On Leaving Cert delays; offshore energy and Jayne Mansfield
[ Number of children in consistent poverty rises by `staggering’ 45,000 - reportOpens in new window ]
There is something viscerally shaming about the thought of a child going to bed hungry. It reeks of Oliver Twist or, closer to home, of Angela’s Ashes, where “the children slurp the porridge and complain that they didn’t get enough, they’re starving with the hunger”. We have confined it in public consciousness to misery lit. It is a terrain most of us visit as psychological tourists, slumming it in a dark past to make us feel better about our present state of plenty.
By my count, the word “hungry” has been used 17 times in the Dáil this year. Some of the speakers were using it metaphorically (“Our airports need to be hungry for this business …”) Most of the references to human bodily hunger were, entirely justifiably, to the terrible events in Gaza.
There was only one real allusion to hunger in Ireland and that was one that placed it firmly in the realm of history. Danny Healy-Rae, summoning the folk memory of his native Kerry, told the Dáil, “I know what hunger is from my grandfather and grandmother telling me of when people were hungry here, what they went through and what they had to go through when they did not have anything to eat. They were poorer times. Gladly, that is not the case here in Ireland today. There is no one hungry like that, or there need not and should not be.”
This last sentence is telling. It is entirely true that no child need or should be hungry in an Ireland awash with money. But it is all too easy to slip from saying that there is no reason for something to be happening to the assumption that it could not be happening.
Yet we know it is. In 2022, a study conducted by Amárach Research for Barnardos found that 17 per cent of Irish parents, and 25 per cent of those who were not working outside the home, reported not being able to provide their children “with a sufficiently nutritious diet, quality and quantity, which you would ideally like”.
This is not about parental fecklessness: in the same study, one in five Irish parents reported skipping or skimping on their own meals so they could feed their kids.
[ More parents going without to feed their children, say BarnardosOpens in new window ]
The last government’s Task Force on Food Poverty notes that while “for some people food skills and a lack of access to shops or equipment play a part”, the basic problem is lack of money: “For most people, the main cause of food poverty is low income in relation to their household costs – not inability to manage money or food.”
The Barnardos study also showed that many of us, even if we are not directly suffering food poverty in our own families, know children who are doing so. Asked, “Do you have any first-hand experience of children where the impact of not having sufficient nutritious food has been evident to you?”, almost one in three Irish people said they did. What they noticed in these children were bad impacts on their physical, cognitive, social and educational development.
Yet there is no common public language even to name this knowledge. An official study of two areas, one in Dublin, the other in rural Ireland, for the Department of Social Protection in 2023, noted that “food poverty, as a specific term, is not used in or by the community. Food insecurity is acknowledged but again not a common phrase in conversations”. Ironically, that report has now itself disappeared from the department’s website, as has the Action Plan based on it. Under “The Action Plan on Food Poverty and the associated research report are available”, it now says “Item was unpublished or removed.”
In spite of this apparently deliberate un-knowing, there has been some real progress in recent years. The Hot School Meals scheme has been gradually rolled out and from this year covers all primary schools. A pilot scheme to continue to provide food to these pupils during the school holidays will start this summer. But there’s still a huge gap in provision for older children and young people. The stark fact is that there are students sitting Junior and Leaving Cert exams today who went to bed hungry last night.
Much of this injustice could be removed almost instantly if the Government would do what it has been talking about for more than a decade: introduce a second level of child benefit targeted at those most in need. But it won’t do that until we decide to know what we know.
