Conspiracy theorists may think it no accident that Irish children spent the week before St Patrick's Festival simultaneously making lurid tricoloured badges and hearts-and-flowers Mother's Day cards.
Over time, the theory might go, the two work are exactly the same: 6.30 a.m until 10.30 p.m.
Although the nature of the drudgery has changed over 60 years, the quantitative difference in drudgery levels is imperceptible. The evidence of RTE radio listeners last week tallies with Margery Spring-Rice's classic study, Working-Class Wives. All mothers are full-time mothers. The culture fails to recognise that fact. The home as we know it is not friendly to the consequences of paid work by mothers.
The workplace as we know it is not family-friendly to anyone, save when legally obliged.
For working mothers there simply is not enough time to go around. For every hour worked in paid employment, according to time management experts, household chores are reduced by only half an hour. Add on official estimates that a child under five needs an average 49 hours extra domestic effort, and prospects for families look grim.
Time is set to become a political issue. It is now the most fleeting, precious and expensive commodity of all. Either you are work rich and time poor, or you are time rich but have no money at all.
Working mothers can in theory buy time to spend with their children, if they earn enough to pay someone else to do the drudgery. Yet in practice, their capacity is limited, because working mothers are the worst-paid and least securely-employed category of the population, as well as the most docile workers.
According to Anthony Murphy's extrapolations from the 1996 Labour Force Survey, 49 per cent of mothers with children under 15 work in paid employment, a massive increase over the last decade. This amounts to 210,000 people, the population of a substantial Irish city.
The world of paid work has changed faster than has the apportioning of unpaid work within the home and family. Every available consumer and advertising survey confirms that trend. The Irish mammy who said there was no need to change the light-bulb because she preferred to sit in the dark rather than trouble anyone is nearly extinct. Yet some might say that the old daddy joke is not dying fast enough: how many Irish daddies does it take to change a light-bulb? Two: one to do it, the other to collect the reward.
The same consumer surveys identify the actual amount of leisure time available to different family members, meaning discretionary time available which can be targeted as potential commercial markets. Every measure places mothers last. The Henley Centre, one of the UK's principal forecasting units, calculates that men have over 14 hours more discretionary time than do mothers, which means mothers now lag two full working days behind.
The health and relationship implications of so little leisure are serious. No matter how bad the traffic or how crowded the train on which a working mother travels to work, her stress levels start falling once she leaves home, and rise again at the point when she puts her key in her own front door. This exactly reverses the trend in working fathers and childless women.
Even superficial solutions are difficult. As young, affluent professionals under 25 are reportedly the only group where men and women share domestic chores more or less proportionately, the working mother could in theory be faced with the choice of taking a chore-friendly young lover or continuing to do most of it herself.
Adultery would obviously create more problems than the drudgery it might resolve, even if she did find time, but marriage to such a personable young man is not an option, given that the sharing behaviour is apparently confined to childless men. This means we are in trouble, unless women stay home altogether, in which case they must practise affirmations and self-reliance skills, because the rest of society will accord them hardly any status at all.
The only way any society ever kept women at home in large numbers was by denying them basic civil rights. To this day, stay-home mothers continue to experience the highest depression rates of any social grouping.
THE Government and IBEC want to attract more mothers into the workforce, which is why an inter-departmental committee is now examining the report on childcare. However, expecting mothers to mimic the downwardly mobile habits of women 60 years ago is not a good assumption with which to begin.
No one is examining the politics of time. Public debate seems transfixed by the narrow poles of the work-spend cycle. It is as though the relationships between work, time and money are so written in stone that we can never change them, yet what few answers are within our reach may make us obliged to redraw that equation.
Plentiful evidence from more heavily industrialised countries suggests that state approaches to childcare need to be multi-layered and multi-levelled - a portfolio strategy, to borrow Charles Handy's term. One option is noticeably absent within the range of possible parent wages, tax reliefs, minimum wages or children's allowances.
It is that every policy and practice be family-proofed across the span of State activity, in a way similar to environmental impact or equality assessment. The current poverty-proofing pilot scheme is a good model.
Family culture is changing: for individuals and governments, the social and psychological consequences of getting it wrong are terrifying. Here, constitutional change for all parents is still on the long finger. Apart from the urgency of addressing the central question of how and how well we care for our children, the Government seems torn between a desire not to offend stayhome mothers whose partners are in paid employment and a Jurassic moral stance which wants to oblige stay-home, single parents to go out to work.
Childcare professional Penelope Leach and New Labour family guru Amitaitzioni argue separately that the total time parents spend with their children has dropped by 40 per cent in a generation. Other experts suggest their figures are questionable.
It still has not happened here, yet parents who may be cherishing the sentiments expressed in hand-made Mother's Day cards might take note of a best-selling new card designed in the first instance for the US market. "Sorry I wasn't there to tuck you in."