IN THE last twenty years, there has been no increase in the rate of teenage pregnancy in Ireland.

Don’t be deceived by the apparent simplicity of this statement. These eighteen words are actually enough to pull the plug on what has become one of the most widely indulged prejudices in this country.

We could all recite the script backwards by now. Society is falling apart. The ideal of the family unit has been destroyed. The classrooms are filled with pregnant schoolgirls. Young women are having babies just to improve their chances of getting housing and welfare benefits. Easier access to contraception has resulted in nothing but greater irresponsibility and huge growth in the number of children being born to teenagers. Blahdeblahdeblah.

If any of the foregoing was true, of course, it would provide serious pause for thought. But it’s not. It is merely a rather sour cocktail of misconceptions and reactionary wishful thinking, based on nothing but myth and inaccurate, anecdotal information.

The reality is, and it’s worth repeating, that in the last twenty years, there has been no increase in the rate of teenage pregnancy in Ireland.

Last year, the Irish Youth Work Centre decided to organise a seminar on the subject of teenage pregnancy. As always with projects such as this, the IYWC initiated the development of an information pack which would be launched to coincide with the seminar. For this, they engaged the services of Christine McGee, an experienced researcher with considerable experience of youth work both here and in Britain.

McGee quickly discovered that, despite all the hot air that is regularly expelled on the topic, no detailed research into Irish teenage pregnancy had ever been conducted. So, she started from scratch. She collated the basic numbers from the Central Statistics Office, drawing out figures for the past twenty years. She also took into consideration relevant British statistics for comparison purposes. After a month’s work, McGee was ready to publish her findings.

Her central conclusion was startling: that despite impressions to the contrary, the number of births to Irish women under the age of twenty did not rise between the years 1972 and 1992. More specifically, she found that the idea of an explosion in the phenomenon of schoolgirl motherhood is a complete fallacy. If anything, the statistics show a decrease in this trend. In 1972, there were fifty-five babies born to girls of sixteen years and under in this country. In 1992, there were forty-five.

There has however been a striking change in the marital status of these girls. In 1972, 24% of births to women under twenty were outside marriage. By 1993 that figure had risen to 89.3%.

It is this growth in the rate of single parents rather than teenage parents that has allowed right-wingers and the knee-jerk media to whip up hysteria about the destruction of society. The truth, of course, is that far fewer girls are being railroaded into shotgun marriages. And that, undoubtedly, is a good thing.

There are interesting statistics too, concerning the total proportion of births to women of all ages now occurring outside marriage: 18% in 1992 as against a mere 3.15% in 1972. Indeed, non-marital births by teenagers actually fell as a percentage of all non-marital births from 38.5% in 1981 to 29.5% in 1989. The bottom line is simply that fewer people in society as a whole now regard the wearing of a wedding ring as a prerequisite to having children.

There are other factors at work here too. “People now have a greater ambivalence about teenagers, especially in relation to sexuality,” asserts Christine McGee. “This has also been borne out by UK studies. Years ago, a sixteen-year-old was considered an adult. Now, because education has been extended, sixteen-year-olds are seen as children and adults.

“There’s more of an ambivalence about their sexuality. People don’t want to see them pregnant because they don’t want to believe that these ‘kids’ are indulging in adult behaviour. This makes it harder for some people to accept and it makes it easier for the creation of an atmosphere of hysteria.”

Then, there’s the notion, spawned in Britain but spreading apace over here, that young women become pregnant simply to jump the housing and social security queues.

“There really isn’t any evidence to support that,” insists McGee. “The only research that was carried out in the UK on that found that the young women knew nothing about housing or the welfare system and most were astonished at the question. It wasn’t to achieve independence, in that very conscious way, that they became pregnant. It was usually something that was completely unplanned.

“There is very little research in the UK and none in Ireland that involves actually talking to these young women,” she adds. “Lots of people theorise about them and why they get pregnant but they almost always come up with myths that just have no validity.”

The clear pattern which emerges from Christine McGee’s research is that young women who are economically disadvantaged and who leave school early are very much more likely to have a child under twenty than comparable young women from more financially secure backgrounds who either go on to third level education or find work when they leave second level.

“A lot of the young women who have children under twenty have been on the labour market for a couple of years before they get pregnant,” she states. “They’ve been hanging around for a while and putting off having a child for them wouldn’t actually increase their possibilities of economic advantage.”

In fact, what research that does exist acknowledges the fact that when, say, an eighteen-year-old lone parent becomes welfare dependent, she’s caught in a net from which it is very difficult to escape.

“Welfare dependency keeps you just above the breadline,” says McGee, “and that’s where many of these women stay. Partly, because many of them don’t have the education to be skilled enough to get work in a well-paid enough job to allow them to afford childcare. And there is no public provision for childcare. In the past, the structure of the lone parent allowance would tend to put you off bothering to earn anything because after the first £12 that you earn, you lose pound for pound after that. Child benefits are also very low in this country in the first place.”

Apart from the Irish statistical benchmark it has given us, the IYWC information pack also highlights some important findings from similar projects abroad. For instance, a 1986 report revealed that the Netherlands, which has the lowest level of teenage pregnancy and abortion in Europe, has the highest level of access for teenagers to contraception and sex education.

“Again, there has been virtually no research done in Ireland into young people and relationships and sexuality and so on,” states Christine McGee. “But from talking to youth workers, we know that they have real difficulty trying to work around sex education. This society is ambivalent about young people being spoken to about sexuality in an open enough way that you can actually change their behaviour or empower them to control their own fertility.

“The higher management structures in many of the youth bodies reflect that. Many youth workers want to be more direct in their sex education but it’s difficult to do so without the backup. Some of the youth groups who have actually done this have spoken to parents beforehand and the parents have been incredibly positive. They’ve been delighted because most of them are very anxious about their children and sexuality.

Youth groups are central in this context because so many of the young people you want to get at leave school early. However, the schools are important because a lot of young people’s notions about sexuality and, in particular, young women’s feelings of self-esteem, really need to be clarified very early on.”

Another area touched upon by the IYWC study and seminar is the fact that teenage parenting in Ireland has become synonymous with teenage motherhood. The exclusion of fathers from the rearing of their children, for whatever reason is says the report, an extremely worrying phenomenon.

“Where are these teenage fathers?” asks McGee. “You never hear about them. Nobody seems to know how to work with them – not even the social services. There’s a notion that they shouldn’t be involved at all. And if, as we’ve found, teenage parenting is usually associated with areas of high economic disadvantage then those young men are being doubly disadvantaged.

“Fathering is a very valid role but, obviously, it’s very difficult for a couple who may not be together anymore to come together to work out a way of parenting together. It would need a huge amount of support and willingness from everybody involved in working in this area.”

Christine McGee and everyone involved with the Irish Youth Work Centre is acutely aware that theirs has merely been a first step, albeit a very important one, towards a fuller understanding of the realities of teenage parenting in Ireland. Much research work remains to be done before the central needs relating to this issue can be identified, let alone faced up to.

On a positive note, McGee believes that the current government has shown a willingness to at least listen to what groups such as the IYWC are saying. “In their last budget, the coalition changed the structure of the lone parent allowance,” she says. “You can now earn £30 as opposed to £12 and still maintain your allowance and then you lose only fifty pence in every pound after that. That shows a keeness to actually look at ways in which lone parents can move out into employment.”

Meanwhile, of course, the moral crusaders continue to tell us that the sky is about to fall in and that, any day now, our civilisation will be submerged beneath a flood of teenage parents and their babies. Christine McGee says she feels unqualified to comment on the political atmosphere which such people are clearly hoping to foment. Nevertheless, she believes that the hysteria is having an effect on many young parents themselves.

“That sort of stigmatising approach definitely adds to the disadvantages that these young women have to struggle with in order to bring up their kids,” she concludes. “A lot of teenage mothers talk about this sense of stigma, of being constantly told they’re irresponsible and that they’re no good. Many of them internalise all that and it makes it very difficult for them to have the confidence to go out and do something positive about their lives.”