A Yes vote would remove two of three references to ‘home’ in the Constitution. This is no accident

Home. It’s such an evocative little word. Being homeless or out-of-home terrifies all of us, yet more than 4,000 children are without a home, more than ever before. People are dying on our streets.

Little attention is being focused on the fact that if we pass the planned referendums in March, we will remove two out of three of the references to home in our Constitution. (More about the third later.) I don’t think that is accidental.

The original wording talked about the contribution to the common good made by “woman” by virtue of her work within the home. (Notably, at this point in article 41, it is “woman” as in all women, not just mothers.)

The next clause specifies that mothers “shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. We can all agree that it is outdated to specify just women’s work in the home, but the proposed new wording ignores the home completely.

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[ If it’s not broke, don’t fix it: voting No is wisest option in upcoming blindman’s buff referendums ]

Virtually every other proposed change retained the word “home”, even if it made the clause gender-neutral or widened it to the community. For example, the proposed wording by the Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality uses the phrase “care within and outside the home”.

But the proposed wording that will be put to the vote reads: “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.”

Nary a home in sight. A cynic might think that reflects the prospect of owning a home slipping further and further out of reach for so many people. The chance of owning a home or even being eligible for social housing in the same urban area you grew up in is even more unattainable.

This is not an accident but results in part from government policy. In Budget 2000, Charlie McCreevy brought in tax individualisation. It achieved a rare thing – infuriating people on the left and right. It was blatant social engineering to get women into the paid workforce whether they wanted to or not.

Few other issues can have united the then archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, and the Irish Family Planning Association in opposition.

All around me, I see incredibly stressed thirty- and fortysomething couples, juggling work and children. They can keep it together until something threatens the fragile equilibrium

The easiest way to explain the complex provision is to use an example. Suppose you have two couples living side by side. The spouses in the first couple each earn €42,000 gross per annum. After tax, they each take home €34,685, a total income of €69,370.

Next door, the wife earns €84,000 gross and the husband stays at home, but even with the home carer credit (a sop introduced to mollify those angry about individualisation) the net income is €61,442. That’s a difference of €7,928 or €152 per week.

That’s not buttons. But mostly, it won’t be the husband at home. When for a long time, I was the wage earner and my husband was the homemaker, we were in a tiny minority. The provision was not brought in to move more men into the paid workforce.

Basically, successive governments of every stripe have failed to value unpaid work in the home, or caring work in general.

The failure to value parents working unpaid at home was short-sighted. Arguably, it exacerbated the dramatic rise in house prices. As two incomes became the norm, house prices followed the law of the market and moved ever higher.

All around me, I see incredibly stressed thirty- and fortysomething couples, juggling work and children. They can keep it together until something threatens the fragile equilibrium. It can be something as normal as a child being sick for more than a couple of days. People age in front of your eyes as they desperately try to cobble together solutions.

There is a TikTok trend, tradwives, where thin, white, conventionally attractive women have full-time jobs producing videos influencing other women by live-action role-playing as 1950s housewives

Those couples who live near a mother can often cope somewhat if their mother is one of the now-endangered species – a woman in the home. Ironic, isn’t it, that what was once a choice for many couples is now only viable for the very well-off or those willing to live with extreme frugality?

There is a TikTok trend, tradwives, where thin, white, conventionally attractive women have full-time jobs producing videos influencing other women by live-action role-playing as 1950s housewives.

Women don’t want to be tradwives, by and large. In shocking news, they want different things at different stages of their lives, including an affordable home and the possibility of working fewer hours outside the home (or none at all) when their children need them most.

Oh, and that other reference to the home in the Constitution? It is about the right of parents to educate their children not at school, but in the home.

Most home-educated people are not hyper-bright, hyper-litigious individuals named Burke from Castlebar. They are instead, a vanishing species. If there are no parents working unpaid in the home, home education will disappear as fast as the Government wants the word “home” to disappear from our Constitution.