Referendum wording does not remove conservative 1930s doctrine. It reinforces it

In my Catholic childhood I noted that there were some ostentatiously holy people who would genuflect properly in church, bending down on the right knee before the tabernacle on the altar. But mostly the act was so dully habitual that it had shrunk into a vague caricature of itself: a slight jerky flexing of the knee in the general direction of the sacred presence.

What brought this to mind was the publication last week of the Government’s proposals for an amendment to Article 42 of the Constitution: “The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

It’s political genuflection. And not even the proper sort. The State is twitching a knee towards one of the most fundamental sources of inequality among its citizens. But we should not mistake this anxious little spasm for genuine recognition of the crucial importance of what is at stake here.

Our society is structured to ensure that no good deed goes unpunished. There’s a price to be paid for caring and it is, overwhelmingly, women who pay it. There can be no true gender equality while this remains the case.

Family and care referendums: what exactly does the Government want to change, and why?

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Yes vote in referendums ‘champions rights’ for disabled people, single-parent families, carers, say campaigners

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Who do you trust to advise you on changes to the Constitution?

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Who’s who? The Yes and No camps in the March 8th family and care referendums

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The referendum next March will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act that finally obliged employers to pay women and men the same wages for the same work. Yet there is still a gap of 10 per cent between the mean hourly earnings of men and women in the Irish workforce. And a study published last week by John Geary and Lisa Wilson shows that “precarious, low-paid jobs are occupied primarily by women. Women are more likely to be in part-time or temporary positions, which are inherently more precarious and offer lower pay.”

Why? Because of the cost of caring. Women are penalised for the unpaid work they do in caring for children and older people. This is true in all developed economies: unpaid care responsibilities keep around 7.7 million women in Europe from participating in the labour market, compared with only 450,000 men. They also make it harder for women who do have paid jobs to build stable careers in secure and well-paid jobs.

But this is also very specifically an Irish problem. In an ESRI study, published in 2019, women in Ireland were estimated to undertake 38.2 hours of unpaid work per week. This places Irish women with their sisters in Romania and Malta as those with the highest unpaid workload in Europe. A typical Irish woman spends an astonishing 16 hours a week more on caring and housework than a typical woman in Denmark.

Ireland also has the seventh highest gender gap in unpaid work hours across the EU. Irish women do 15 hours more unpaid work every week than Irish men do, including about 11 more hours spent directly on caring. Overall, women do about twice as much care-related work in Irish homes than men do.

None of this is inevitable or God-given. The wide variations across Europe show that the punishment of female caring is a matter of choice. It’s about the way society is organised and in particular the degree to which caring is understood as a collective responsibility. Some societies do an awful lot more than ours does to support carers with money and home and community -based services, to give fathers the opportunity to be more involved in the raising of their children, and to lift the barriers that keep women out of decent jobs.

The Government’s proposed constitutional amendments aim, quite rightly, to get rid of the sexist and patronising language inserted in 1937, claiming “that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. It also wants to broaden the Constitution’s definition of the family to reflect current social realities.

This is well and good. But the proposed wording on caring is dreadful. It may be worse than useless: a gesture that in fact indicates the State’s complete lack of intention to create the changes without which women will never be fully equal citizens.

Firstly, the new wording removes all specific reference to women, speaking only of “members of a family”. This might be okay if the rest of the proposed clause actually committed the State to trying to take the penalties for caring off the shoulders of women. But it doesn’t.

Both the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality and the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality suggested a wording that “obliges the State to take reasonable measures to support care within the home and wider community”. The Citizens’ Assembly voted for this strong form of words by 81 per cent to 19 per cent. The Oireachtas Committee supported it unanimously.

The Government has effectively repudiated this wording. Its formula is that the State will merely “strive to support” the provision of care within the family. It makes two huge changes – obligation becomes a meaningless “striving” and the idea that care also exists in the “wider community” (or as the Oireachtas committee explicitly put it “within and outside the home and Family”) is gone. Indeed, in the Government’s formulation it is quite explicitly the carer who supports “Society” and not society that supports the carer. Conservative 1930s doctrine is not removed but reinforced.

This sleight of tongue makes the proposed “care” clause not a progressive change but a reactionary one. It is an implicit reaction against the idea that the State has any actual obligation to support carers and against the social democratic principle that caring is both a familial and a social responsibility.

These reactionary positions are in turn an implicit statement that the State does not feel obliged to tackle the root causes of gender inequality. Women would be crazy to bend the knee again to such insulting gestures.