The new government must not turn its back on care like the last one did

What we need from the next Dáil is an understanding that care is the fundamental work of any society, writes Victoria White

Care. From where I’m sitting that’s what was missing from the Coalition’s agenda. Care is in crisis in this society because there is no value put on care. Care is in crisis because love doesn’t have a price.

What price can you put on the care Mary McDonnell has given her daughter Sinead, severely impacted by cerebral palsy, for the last 50 years in her home in Douglas? It is impossible to even begin to count the cost to Mary who was a young woman of 28 when this massive care responsibility landed on her shoulders.

That’s why there was an outcry last week when it emerged that she had suddenly lost her 10 annual weeks of respite care in St Laurence’s Cheshire Home in Cork because, following a HIQA inspection, Sinead’s need were deemed too complex for its facility. Fourteen other families were in the same boat.

And yet the respite is not even the main issue. The unspoken question is what will happen to Sinead when Mary, now 78, is unable to do the job which a well-equipped State facility has deemed “too complex”?

This is the question which constantly floats around the head of the parents of children with special needs. I don’t face a fraction of the challenges faced by Mary with my autistic son Tom but I have also had the door of respite shut in my face for the moment.

“We’ve never been in this position before”, the social worker told me, apologising for the fact that though I was invited to view the wonderful respite home which would have given him independent teen weekends and allowed our family to breathe, there would not be any place for him in the near future.

Let’s make clear here that there is no government anywhere in the world which can make life peachy for the family of every disabled person. Focusing on one sad story with no context is lazy, populist journalism. I understand scant resources and I respect the service for prioritising the more needy. But the Coalition’s attacks on us seemed gratuitious.

How could any decent person have stood up and voted for a 20% cut in the Respite Care Grant, effective from 2012 until the pre-election budget? How could it have been deemed fair to make such a cut in the derisory provision that a person gets for caring for a loved one, night and day, especially the 20,000-odd who only receive this payment?

Look, I accept that the Respite Care Grant is ineffective. It just acknowledges that there is not enough respite care to go around. My 17-year-old suggests that respite should be a vouched expense. This would surely force the development of a respite care industry which would of course be inspected by the State. But to start by singling out carers and taking a hatchet to their payment… That makes me angry.

Particularly as there began to be a sort of coherence to the attack on care. I was stunned when Joan Burton’s Department of Social Protection took an axe to the contributory pensions of people, mostly women, who had taken years out of the labour force to work in their homes. This resulted in a fine of up to €1,500 a year for some women who had been forced to leave their jobs due to the marriage bar. The “Homemakers’ Credit” which would have expunged the effect of this bar was deemed too expensive to implement at a paltry €160 million a year.

There was more to come. I was dumb-founded when Joan Burton kicked lone parents whose youngest child was seven off their One Parent Family Payment. Following a brilliant campaign , “7 is too young”, run by Barnardos, the National Women’s Council of Ireland and the one parent family charity, OPEN, she clearly stated in the Dáil on April 18, 2012, that she would not be making these changes until she had a “credible and bankable commitment” to the introduction of a system of “safe, affordable and accessible childcare similar to what is found in Scandinavian countries”.

Then she went ahead and made the cuts anyway. Sorry as I am for a number of hard-working Labour TDs who have been booted out, including Alex White, Kathleen Lynch and AodhánÓ Ríordáin, the party deserved what it got for this appalling move alone and the only shame is that it was not Joan Burton herself who felt the brunt of it.

Éamon Ó Cuív had ruled out these cuts in the same department but Joan Burton clearly believed what she was doing was right. Study the defence of the move made in the Dáil and you will see that care is considered “passive” while paid work is considered “active”. Care is not seen as work and there is no value put on it. This is consistent with traditional capitalist economics and trade union economics.

These two economic visions, which are really different faces of the same ideology, have become increasingly dominant since the 1980s. The Second Commission on the Status of Women in 1992 ruled against the provision of a payment to parents in the home on the grounds the work was “primarily a benefit to the earning partner.” All they could see happening in the home was a woman ironing her husband’s shirts. The care of children was invisible to them.

Judge Catherine McGuinness, who sat on the commission, described this view recently as “old-fashioned in today’s terms because it was concentrating too much on economic independence and independence within the family as a sort of reaction against the patriarchy.”

But, she explains, the two voices which were strongest on the commission were those of the trade unions and those of the employers.

The commission had actually been tasked by Charles Haughey to investigate a payment to the parent in the home because that was the single item most requested in submissions from the public. For all its desperate faults, Fianna Fáil has often stood up for care. I remember much-maligned Brian Cowen contending in the Dáil in 2005 that to divert all support for parents towards working parents would be unfair to those who “made their contribution” by parenting at home.

Crudely targeted cash payments were too often their answer, however. What we need from the next Dáil, which has more women in it than ever before, is a clear understanding that care is the fundamental work of any society. This means many things including the restoration of full pension rights for carers in the home, full parental leave for at least three years, restitution of the One Parent Family payment until the youngest child is 14 — 18 or 21 in special cases — and a statutory right to holidays and retirement for workers like Mary McDonnell and her nearly 200,000 caring peers.

We need to understand for the first time that the love that inspires care doesn’t mean it’s not work; it means it’s the most important work there is.

For more election news, analysis and general banter join us HERE