Joyce Fegan: Would the mums of Ireland please run for office?

Would a second wave of Covid-19 finally push the people who run the domestic houses of Ireland into running the political ones instead?

Sometimes the world seems to neatly divide into two kinds of people: those who are responsible for everything and those who are accountable for nothing.

And why this week does such a division come to mind?

It seems such synchronistic timing that on the week that the mothers of Ireland took a collective sigh of relief as schools and preschools and Montessori’s reopen, we were reading article after article about the “unreserved” apologies of politician after politician, and other high-ranking members of Irish life, who went to that Oireachtas golf function of 81 people.

In the midst of a global pandemic, unreserved apologies do not cut the mustard, Seán O’Rourke, Séamus Woulfe (Supreme Court judge), John Cummins (Fine Gael Senator), Jerry Buttimer (leas cathaoirleach of Seanad Éireann), and Noel Grealish (Independent TD for Galway).

On a side note, you’d wonder did they get a five-for-the-price of one PR deal, what with the “unreserved apology” wording? Now-resigned EU Commissioner Phil Hogan at least took an independent, if somewhat creative path and went for “profound” apology.

And then, to top it all off, in perhaps some attempt to pour cold water on the fire of public outrage, we have a retired judge warning of the “great danger” in hounding people out of office. Justice Garrett Sheehan — asking people in positions of high leadership, who have behaved in a gravely irresponsible way at the height of a global crisis to step down, isn’t exactly your textbook definition of cancel culture. It’s just holding people to account, as you have done your entire career.

But it comes down to that division again doesn’t it — the divide between those who are accountable for nothing and those who are responsible for everything.

This is not, however, another article about that reckless, irresponsible golf function of 81. What a nuisance of a distraction that fallout has been as we try to grapple with this global pandemic and try to rebuild our world.

This is an article questioning our political system in general. Why aren’t the people that actually run Ireland, the mothers who juggle paid and unpaid work with the cooking and the cleaning, the nap times and the school runs, the homeschooling, the eldercare, and the childcare, not sitting in the Dáil or the Seanad or on the legal benches of this country?

They’re not sitting there because they simply don’t have the bloody time.

And not only do they not have the time, but they also don’t have the opportunity or the neck. And yes many men share the responsibility of parenting and do the cooking and the cleaning. But statistically, it’s women who run the domestic houses, not the political houses of Ireland.

Interestingly, a 2015 report from the McKinsey Global Institute showed that family care work in Ireland is shared unequally between women at 70% and men at 30%.

And earlier this year, an Oxfam report found that Irish women’s unpaid work in the home was worth €24bn to the Irish economy — the equivalent of about one-eighth of the entire national economy, on an annual basis.

And during lockdown, this took the form of childminding, homeschooling, working from home, getting children to avoid other children, missing summer camps, and socially distancing from grandparents and other relatives who help out with childcare.

These mothers ensured they followed the guidelines to the letter of the law and they cancelled holidays abroad, to ensure that schools could return and children could get back to normal. If there was a golf outing — they certainly weren’t going.

Even the Central Statistics Office looked at the social impact of Covid-19 on women and men. Women had an 88.4% compliance rate with government advice, and men 72.5%. If only the mothers of Ireland were running the country.

In this year’s general election, approximately 530 people declared themselves worthy of running for office. A total of 70% of those, 530, were men and 30% were women.

Statistically, it’s been proven that when women do run for election they fair well. The only problem is women either aren’t asked to run (we’re still waiting on that gender quota for local politics), or they don’t seek election.

The reasons women don’t run for office are as follows:

•  They are less likely than men to be willing to endure the rigours of a political campaign.
•  They are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office.
•  They are less likely than men to have the freedom to reconcile work and family obligations with a political career.
•  And they are less likely than men to think they are “qualified” to run for office.

This week an HSE advert on Facebook asked people to “keep your child at home from childcare, school or preschool” if your child has a temperature of 38C or more, a new cough and other ailments. The advert did not stipulate the working-from-home arrangements that would be needed in such incidences.

Sure enough, the mothers of Ireland will step into that unpaid breach.

And what if they don’t? What if these mothers are the underpaid nurses and midwives that run our hospitals? What if these mothers are teachers themselves? What if these mothers do childminding from their home to make ends meet?

What if there is another reckless golf function? Or worse, another wave and all schools are locked down again? This thought is and has always been on every parent’s mind for months now, hence the responsible, compliant, leadership-like behaviour.

Would a second wave finally push the people who run the domestic houses of Ireland into running the political ones instead?

They’re more than qualified and they’d be better paid too. We pay our TDs a basic salary of €96,189 and our senators €68,111, not a bad increase from working for free.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much prefer politicians who could manage a temperature and a tantrum on one hand, while teaching the modh coinníollach and boiling spuds on the other, than a politician who acts irresponsibly and then apologises unreservedly.