Sir, - In the current debate concerning the Budget, with its extraordinary provisions giving "most favoured" treatment to married couples where both spouses engage in gainful employment outside the home, it is important to remind ourselves of the express terms of Article 41 of the Constitution (happily still surviving the best efforts of the Constitution Review Body to water it down).
It reads as follows:
1. 1: The State recognises the Family as the natural, primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.
2: The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.
2. 1: In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
2: The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
Article 40 guarantees that all citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law, with a proviso that the State may, in its enactments, "have due regard to differences of capacity, physical and moral, and of social function".
The proposal in the Budget to discriminate in a substantial manner in favour of the married couple where both partners are wage-earners appears to discriminate without any good or valid reason against the woman who elects to devote her time to looking after her family and her home, and to the upbringing of her children, thereby "giving to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved." - Yours, etc.,
Roderick J. O'Hanlon, (Former Judge of the High Court), Kilternan, Co Dublin.