Government policy driving the housewife to extinction

The anniversary of the two most recent referendums came and went last weekend. Do you remember them? I’m not sure you’re meant to. One was about inserting the concept of ‘durable relationships’ into the Constitution alongside marriage. The other was an attempt to remove from the Constitution the requirement that the State should seek to protect mothers from being forced out of the home by economic necessity.

The two referendum proposals were massively defeated, as you may recall. But as quickly as possible the political system and the media put what happened down the memory hole. They didn’t want to remember them, and they didn’t want the rest of us to remember them either. The reason is because the Government, and nearly all of the opposition parties (minus Aontú and eventually Independent Ireland), plus almost the whole of the NGO sector, led by the National Women’s Council were all line up on the same side; they wanted us to vote ‘Yes’ in both cases.

The attempt to ditch the word ‘mother’ was never going to pass”

Almost the entirety of the media was also on the Yes side. One of the main reasons that both referendums were defeated was the opposition of figures like Senator Michael McDowell, who had voted Yes in the marriage referendum of 2015, and the abortion referendum of 2018. He could not be dismissed as a stick-in-the-mud conservative, and this seemed to swing a lot of voters. His opposition persuaded many people that you could vote No and still be considered ‘modern’.

The referendum on mothers in the home also attracted the opposition of people who supported the replacement of the word ‘mothers’ with ‘carers’, but did not think it went far enough in committing the State to helping carers.

However, the defeat was so massive – 74% vs 26% – that the attempt to ditch the word ‘mother’ was never going to pass.

Choice

This stunned the establishment because for years they had attacked Article 41.2 of the Constitution on the grounds that it was both sexist and outdated. It was mischaracterised as claiming that a mother’s place is in the home, when it did nothing of the sort. The aspiration was to try and ensure that mothers would not be forced out of the home in order to make ends meet, that is, to give mothers a choice between home and work.

That choice is increasingly denied to them, as is clear from new figures from the Central Statistics Office. These show that in 2010, there were around 500,000 women of working age in Ireland described their ‘Principal Economic Status’ as “engaged in home duties”, meaning in almost every case that they are housewives (to us an old term).

But that figure has now plummeted to just 200,000, which is a 60% drop in just 15 years. Only about 13% of women of working age are now stay-at-home mothers.

The new CSO report is called ‘Women in the Labour Market 2023-2024’ and what most media picked up from it is the fact that the number of women in the workplace has almost doubled since 1998 to about 1.3 million.

The answer is obviously a resounding no”

However, this is something to be lauded and welcomed only if it is what women themselves want, and especially mothers. A poll conducted by Amarach last year on behalf of The Iona Institute in the run-up to the referendums found that 69% of mothers would stay at home with their children if they had the economic freedom to do so. This was almost identical to a poll commissioned by Sudocrem a few years before.

But does it seem like this Government, or any Government over the last few decades could care less about those women? Does it look like the Government is making an effort to protect mothers from the forced out of the home by economic necessity? The answer is obviously a resounding no.

This attitude dates back to at least Budget 2000 when the then Finance Minister, Charlie McCreevy, introduced tax individualisation which meant that a two-income married couple would pay much less in tax than a single-income married couple next door on the same income. This could run to thousands each year.

There was uproar at the time, but it quickly died down when a sop was introduced called the Homecarers Credit, which does not come close to balancing out the unfair effects of tax individualisation.

Day-care

Now the Government is all about day-care which explicitly favours those who go out to work and put their children in day-care.

The Government wants to make day-care as cheap as possible. It is committed to reducing the cost of full-time day-care to around €200 per child per month, which will involve massive State subsidies.

As at Budget 2024, under then Children’s Minister, Roderic O’Gorman, €1.1 billion was being funnelled by the State into day-care, with this figure set to increase fast. Next to nothing is being done for stay-at-home parents even though only about 20% of parents actually want to put their children into daycare. The rest want to either mind their children themselves or else have a relative do so.

In other words, the Government is expressly channelling parents towards a ‘choice’ (day-care) most of them would prefer not to make.

How is this in any way meeting the State’s Constitutional duty to try and protect mothers from being forced out of the home due to economic necessity? It is doing the opposite. Is such a discriminatory policy even Constitutional?

In 2008, during the period of austerity, the Government abolished something called the Early Childcare Supplement which was paid to mothers of children aged under the age of 6 on top of Child Benefit. It amounted to €1,000 per annum.

If the Government restored that benefit and reallocated the subsidy it is currently putting into daycare towards this instead, it would come to around €3,000 per child under 6, which is the equivalent of three-monthly mortgage payments. What mother would refuse that?

The Government is not about to do that because it wants all mothers out working”

Daycare providers couldn’t complain because if parents wanted, they could take this €3,000 payment and use it to reduce their day-care costs. In other words, it would be a much fairer and less discriminatory policy than the current one of heavily favouring day-care over minding your own children at home.

This would also put meat on the bones of last year’s referendum result. But the Government is not about to do that because it wants all mothers out working and it is probably very pleased that the number of stay-at-home mothers has fallen by 60pc since 2010. It would probably be very happy if it fell by another 60% in the next 15 years. Certainly this seems to be the aim of its policies.