Needed: a new deal for mothers

It is as though the two referendums in March never happened, that is, the one on so-called ‘durable relationships’, and the other on removing the protection the Constitution tries to give to mothers in the home.

That second one was long the target of feminist groups in Ireland, above all the lavishly State-funded National Women’s Council whose chief aim seems to be to ensure that as many mothers as possible are out in the workplace whether they like it or not.

This suits both the Government, and employers. The Government wants as many people turned into tax-payers as possible, and employers want to expand the workforce as much as possible, while the economy is booming at any rate.

Forced

The Constitution says that mothers should not be forced out of the home by economic necessity. It never said that mothers should not go out to work. What it sought to do is protect the home from the demands of the economy.

In any event, the ‘People Who Matter’, that is, politicians, those who run the big NGOs, academics, journalists and so on, have long been appalled at this provision and finally they thought it would soon be removed from the Constitution. They were fully confident they would get their way in the March referendum, but they were resoundingly defeated, by a margin of nearly three to one.

But has this massive defeat made any difference to Government thinking, or to that of any of the other main parties? You must be joking. It’s like the referendum never happened at all. It has been ‘memory-holed’, that is, forgotten about. They do not talk about it.

Repeated polls down the years show that only a minority of parents want to put their children into day-care”

Instead, all they talk about is day-care. The main parties have big plans to put yet more money into daycare in order to make it cheaper for parents to put their children in a creche all day while they go out to work, perhaps precisely because economic necessity is forcing them to do so.

At one level, this might seem fair enough. Daycare is expensive and lots of parents do use it. But is putting so much money into daycare actually fair and is it what most parents actually want?

Repeated polls down the years show that only a minority of parents want to put their children into daycare. A big majority want to either look after them at home while they are very young, or else have a family member or a childminder to do. They do not relish putting their children into a daycare centre for hours every day.

Politicians

But nearly all of our politicians seem to assume this is what they want, and they never seem to think to actually ask them, and they seem to imagine that the referendum result in March has absolutely nothing to say to them.

During that referendum, an Amarach research poll was published (it was commissioned by The Iona Institute which I run) and it found that more than two-thirds of mothers (69%) with children under the age of 18 would prefer to stay at home with their children rather than go out to work if they could afford it.

A much fairer way to allocate public funding in this regard is not to put more and more into daycare, but to put it directly into the hands of parents of young children so they can spend it on the choice that suits them.

Currently, the State is allocating around €1.1 billon per annum towards day-care with that figure certain to keep increasing”

In Ireland, we have Child Benefit which is paid to mothers with children under 18. But for a few short years we also had something called the ‘Early Childcare Supplement’ which was paid to mothers with children under the age of six in addition to Child Benefit. When it was abolished in 2008 during the era of austerity it came to €1,000 per annum.

Why not restore that? Why not increase it? Currently, the State is allocating around €1.1 billon per annum towards day-care with that figure certain to keep increasing.

Maths

In Ireland, there are around 370,000 children aged 5 or under, so let’s do a bit of maths. If you divide €1.1 billion by 370,000 you arrive at a figure of almost €3,000. This means that if the €1.1 billion was reallocated from daycare and the Early Childcare Supplement restored, the supplement would come to almost €3,000 per child aged 5 or under per annum, not €1,000 per child per annum when it was abolished back in 2008.

On top of Child Benefit, a sum of €3,000 would go quite a long way. Parents could then decide whether they want to use that money to help pay for daycare, or a childminder, or to help one of the parents stay at home for a few years. Restoring and increasing the Early Childcare Supplement is certainly much fairer than simply putting all the money into daycare regardless of what parents really want.

Successive Governments believe every mother belongs in the workplace and every child in day-care, like it or not. How is that not sexist, by the way?”

Something else the Government could do is increase the Home Carers’ Credit. This was introduced at the time of tax individualisation in 2000 because tax individualisation was so obviously biased in favour of working parents and against stay-at-home parents. It caused a big backlash at the time that the then Finance Minister, Charlie McCreevy, introduced the Home Carers’ Credit as a sop. It has never amounted to much. Why not? The answer is that successive Governments believe every mother belongs in the workplace and every child in day-care, like it or not. How is that not sexist, by the way? It assumes they know where a woman’s place is.

Here’s another idea. Set up a National Mothers’ Council with State-funding to represent the clear majority of mothers who would rather mind their children at home in their early years. It is obvious that the National Women’s Council is never going to do that, and therefore another organisation is needed to represent the women the NWC won’t represent.

And here is a final idea. Putting so much money into day-care and ignoring stay-at-home mothers so badly would seem be to against the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution. Putting all the money into daycare does nothing to prevent mothers being forced out of the home by economic necessity and probably has the opposite effect. So perhaps one day some brave mother should take a Constitutional case having sought good legal advice and some financial support to enable her to take such a case.

One way or another, we need a ‘New Deal for Mothers’ given that the political system seems to care so little for them. Keep this in mind ahead of polling day on November 29.