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.

[ 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........

© The Irish Times