What can be done to make care less gendered and more respected in Ireland?

We need to normalise men taking up caring roles, both informal unpaid care in the home, and as a professional career

Jennifer Horgan with her father Billy, who suffered a stroke three years ago. Picture: Dan Linehan

Who cares? Well, women, mostly.

As a child I’d often wake in the night with growing pains. My dad would get up and rub my legs until I could get back to sleep. He’d carry me on his shoulders on family holidays. In a lot of ways, for as long as I needed him to, he carried me. Later, he became my mum’s carer.

I was so very lucky to be brought up by a caring man. In Ireland, we need more like him.

When my father suffered a stroke in 2019, he received his last rites, before turning a corner.

After months of rehabilitation, he was set to come home. We scrambled to organise his care. We knew the basic home help from the HSE wouldn’t be enough.

Two disabled people living alone would need more support to guarantee their safety.

We began by looking into private health care. I remember a woman coming to my house for tea to discuss the best plan. She wore expensive perfume. She used the right words, like 'dignity', and 'person-centred'.

Then she shared her price list. At an hourly rate, including sleeping hours, the costs were eye-watering, and presumably beyond what most families in Ireland can afford.

It upsets me to think that there are other families out there, feeling as stressed and alone as we did, back in 2019.

We’ve found our rhythm now. A Brazilian woman takes wonderful care of our parents during the week. And myself and my siblings care for them at the weekends. They also receive home help. We are lucky on that front too.

Unusually, against the odds, my dad’s home help is a man. They poke fun at one another in a way my dad enjoys. I’m very grateful to Mick for choosing to be a carer.

Jennifer Horgan is delighted her dad, Billy, gets on so well with home care assistant Mick Carroll, and muses why more there aren't more men in such roles. Picture: Dan Linehan

Because people like Mick, men who are paid to care, are scarce. Men are also less likely to carry out unpaid care duties.

According to an Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) study in 2019, on average, women in Ireland spend double the time of men on caring, and more than twice as much time on housework.

The gendered nature of family care is evident in every doctor’s waiting room across Ireland, at every school gate, and outside every creche.

At the core of the problem in Ireland, is the fact that we don’t value care, because we don’t value the work traditionally carried out by women. We fail to recognise the essential nature of care, our interdependence, and so vulnerable families find themselves looking to private companies they can’t afford.

The same cost crisis and gendering of care is evident across childcare in Ireland.

I’m grateful to be past the baby stage, but my mum's friends struggle with the cost of early years childcare. And yes, it’s invariably mothers who discuss it. The sector, predominantly run by women, is also grossly unsupported.

A friend living up the country informs me that expectant mums put their babies’ names down for creche four weeks into pregnancy, even with no hope of getting a place until the child is at least six months old, due to waiting lists. She tells me of places being lost due to a backlog of children not moving onto primary school.

The same woman left her corporate job after trying to make it work with two children. After too many nights going between excessive work demands and children needing her care, she took a less demanding job in her field.

Jennifer Horgan with her father Billy. Picture: Dan Linehan

Now, soon to return to work after maternity leave with her third child, she’s wondering if it makes sense to return to a 38-hour week when her salary will equate to less than the minimum wage once she deducts €2,100 for childcare costs.

She feels let down by the subsidies in place through the National Childcare Subsidy Scheme (NCSS), which is a separate administrative burden and can be reduced if her children miss too many days of creche. She’s thankful her employer has signed up to the NCSS, which is not mandatory. Her story is common.

According to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, based on the percentage of income spent on childcare, Ireland is the third most expensive country in the European Union. Politicians promise cuts in costs, but they will also need to support and adequately fund workers in the sector. The knock-on effect of our low regard for care and for women is proving significant.

Sadly, we are doing little in Ireland to reconfigure the gendered nature of care work.

It’s difficult when even our classrooms are predominantly populated by women. And boys don’t gravitate towards professions their fathers continue to overlook. The ESRI study concludes that “The Irish welfare state has been characterised as a liberal ‘modified male breadwinner’ system".  

In this sense, there may be more women in the workplace, but they’re still shouldering the lion’s share of care work.

“These trends,” the study finds, “open new contradictions and pressures on working and family life, especially for women.” Interestingly, my friend relates childcare costs to her income and not her husband’s. She speaks of her career as being the dispensable one, should they choose to opt out of the soaring childcare cost.

So, what can be done to make care less gendered and more respected in Ireland? Do Irish women need to replicate what happened in Iceland on October 24, 1975 — when 90% of women in the country went on strike?

Jennifer Horgan with her father Billy. Picture: Dan Linehan

At the very least we must finally amend article 41.2 of the constitution, which reads:

“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.”

Orla O’Connor of the National Women’s Council of Ireland makes the pertinent point that we must re-word, not delete the article. To delete it would be to miss “this unique opportunity to express the positive contribution of equality in the home, care, and work of all kinds.”

Care work must happen. Our interdependence is something to celebrate, not ignore. Care work is both rewarding and meaningful — even more so when it is shared equally among men and women.

Work must also be done at an institutional level to normalise part-time work among men, and to increase their paid parental leave.

Work must be done at a cultural level too. Men might join the mums’ WhatsApp groups or take charge of remembering birthdays, choosing presents. Fathers must model care for their sons, by taking on more paid and unpaid caring duties.

What’s imperative in all of this, is that this changemaking work is done by men, not pushed by women. Women are tired of pushing.

As it stands, it’s the people at the centre of the crisis who are trying to change it. In my work as an education columnist, I meet advocacy groups for children with additional needs. The members are women. I attend courses on social justice and creative activism; the facilitators and participants are mostly women.

My genuine fear is that we’ll remain as we are, stuck in a loop, with only women bothering to read to the end of this article, with only women bothering to fight for change.