Child benefit works as intended – and not just by buying votes for politicians

There is always an echo. Twenty-two years ago on a comically relaxed election canvass in a north Kildare housing estate, a laughing young mother came to the door with a baby and toddler in tow and ordered the Fianna Fáil minister for finance, Charlie McCreevy to “keep the money coming”. “And you keep up production,” he grinned back, reminding her she would be getting “a pile of money” a few days later when a double helping of child benefit kicked in.
That was May 2002, six years before the economic crash. “People are content,” said McCreevy.
A few days before the election, he said he could confirm there were “no significant overruns projected and no cutbacks whatsoever were being planned, secretly or otherwise”.
The media did its best to counter the government narrative with one paper’s full-page warning delivered within dotted lines for readers to cut out and keep – so the paper could say afterwards, “I told you so”.
But the “keep the money coming” strategy worked. Fianna Fáil failed to get the overall majority, winning 81 seats and forming a majority coalition with the PDs. Fine Gael lost 23 including big beasts such as Alan Dukes, Nora Owen, Austin Currie, Alan Shatter and Jim Mitchell, the deputy leader of Fine Gael.
Anyone inclined to read up on the FF/PD coalition budget that year – when the economy was still in good shape – will note the nearly-hidden cuts, slashes and freezing across departments that would help determine the long-term destiny of areas such as infrastructure, health, communications and transport.
PJ Mara, the master of Fianna Fáil’s dark arts, later told a story about someone he met during the campaign who said the most influential radio station in the world was called WIFM. “What’s that?” asked Mara. It means “What’s Init For Me?” .
The heady whiff of WIFM about the latest budget has been well documented, with much of the emphasis on the bags of pixie dust also known as the double-double child benefit and “baby boost” payments. Untargeted they may be, but child benefit – or the children’s allowance as it was known – will hold a special place among mothers of all incomes and life choices. It’s 80 years, remarkably, since the payment was introduced as an anti-poverty measure for large families, in contrast with other European countries where it was designed to encourage more human reproduction to replace the population lost in the war.
But while the mother was certainly seen as the primary care giver in Ireland – and is still famously enshrined as such in Article 41.2 of the Constitution – when it came to collecting child benefit, she couldn’t be trusted with it. The person designated to collect the payment was the father, a law that stood for 30 years. This was a time when few married women had an independent income and those who did were inexplicably paid less per hour than men – 20 per cent less than married male colleagues in the case of women teachers and 20 per cent less for female civil servants than both their married and single male colleagues.
In fairness to the men of Ireland, Labour’s Frank Cluskey, who brought forward the change in legislation allowing the payment to go directly to mothers in 1974, noted that 85 per cent of fathers had already nominated the mother to directly receive it. Perhaps the remaining 15 per cent used it for flowers and gifts but Cluskey was responding to a growing awareness of spousal neglect of wives and children. It took another three years for the UK to do the same, where it was charmingly dubbed the “wallet to handbag” transfer. A Tory MP complained in parliament that “far from being a child benefit scheme, it looks like being a fathers’ dis-benefit scheme”.
But UK research showed that it worked as intended. Spending patterns did actually change for a significant number of families, with a substantial increase in the share of household income spent on children’s clothes and, to a smaller extent, on women’s clothes. It demonstrated that for some British families and especially low-income ones, decisions on how family resources are spent depend on who receives the income. The reform reduced poverty among women and children within households, poverty which could be masked if the household was only looked at as a unit.
Although a 2016 ESRI study of Irish households found no comparable evidence of hidden female poverty masked within the wider household, it concluded that in low-income households at risk of poverty, additional income is normally spent by mothers in the interests of their children. Anecdotally, many of us will be aware of cases where a relatively high earner in a household is no guarantee that there will be a fair distribution of those earnings. As long as it is assumed that women will be the primary carers – whether they want to be or not – there can never be a guarantee. And these are well-kept family secrets.
Child benefit became a hot-button issue in 2012 when the all-powerful International Monetary Fund recommended “better targeting” of it. That suggestion met with a stormy blowback from support groups such as Barnardos and the Children’s Rights Alliance as well as politicians. It also elicited some heartfelt declarations of intent by a few patriotic beneficiaries to hand it back – until they found alas, that there was no provision to opt out of it. The good news for those chafing under the burden of the undeserved bonanza is that it’s an opt-in payment. And they are free to opt out any time they want.