Alison O'Connor: Restrictions? Let's begin by lifting one that has solely targeted women
Laura Cahillane of the School of Law at UL has said Article 41.2 did not set out to confine women to their homes — but rather to allow them to stay home to raise families. The problem is, no policy to provide for this financially was put in place, so women never developed that economic right. Picture: Oisin McHugh
Good news alert. Tomorrow, Irish women look set to be released from the home.
No, this is not some gender-positive lifting of Covid restrictions, favouring ‘the fairer sex’. Rather, it will be the decision by the Citizens’ Assembly on what to do with that appallingly sexist ‘in the home’ Article 41.2 of our Constitution.
This Citizens’ Assembly was established before Covid hit. Little did Irish women know then that they would be practically welded to the home for the past year by a series of rolling lockdowns that involved working from home, home-schooling, and a host of other pandemic-management measures.
When the 100 assembly members began their work — taking place remotely owing to the circumstances — they could not have been imagined how much the pandemic would have had an influence on the deliberations.
There may be a serendipity to this, as a veritable cornucopia of gender recommendations are due to be unveiled on issues that have negatively affected women for far longer than the pandemic but which were brought into such acute focus over recent months.
Tomorrow we will be told the result of 80 votes. As well as the domestic expectations of women, among the other ballots were the extension of gender quotas in elections, such as local elections, and looking at increasing financial penalties for parties who fail to meet the targets.
There was the issue of increasing the quotas for female members of publicly-funded boards, as well as making funding contingent on that, publicly-funded childcare, terms and conditions for carers, the gender pay gap, and the minimum wage, as well as harmful and abusive content on social media.
Initially, domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence was not on the assembly’s agenda but a decision was made early on, given how often it was mentioned in the public submissions to the assembly, to include it. This is another area upon which the pandemic has thrown a sharp light.
According to Garda figures, more than 7,600 criminal charges were brought against suspects for a range of domestic violence crimes last year, up 25%.
In its contribution to the assembly, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) called for a central focal point in Government which would co-ordinate “all actions needed to bring about a society free or at least intolerant of sexual violence”. DRCC chief executive Noeline Blackwell said there is no body, person, or office in charge of managing the sexual violence epidemic, “let alone get rid of it”.
Because of the Zoom nature of proceedings, all the voting by the citizens actually took place last Saturday — which does take a little from the excitement and momentum of watching events unfold live.
When this assembly was established, there was a broad scope of topics to be covered.
Clearly, as events unfolded, the care issue was really magnified, particularly the manner in which is it traditionally undervalued. Another layer of consideration was the manner in which it was lower-paid workers who were the ones that had to keep going out to work — whether it was a supermarket employee or a nursing home assistant — to keep the economy and society operating during the past year of lockdowns.
Others topics — including norms and stereotypes, leadership, pay and the workplace, and structural economic inequalities — were all considered.
Back to the highly contentious Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution.
It is in place since 1937. While it doesn’t specifically say that “a woman’s place is in the home”, it does provide that “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”.
It continues, somewhat infamously, as follows:
It is truly remarkable that this old-fashioned article, seeming to justify the low status of Irish women, compared to the male breadwinner, has remained so long in our Constitution.
This was the second time that a citizens’ assembly debated this clause, with the Constitutional Convention recommending in 2013 the amending of Article 41.2 to make it gender-neutral, and recognising the importance of care work and providing for a reasonable level of State support for carers. In 2016, the Government committed to holding a referendum on it.
Here we are, years later, with no change. Some dismiss concerns relating to it as an overreaction. But there is no doubt this article has a significant symbolism.
It has contributed to a lack of agency for Irish women over the decades. Looking to the past, it has been linked to what was known as the marriage bar, which existed right up to the 1970s and demanded that women in certain public service jobs give up their employment to be at home.
More recently, we were shockingly reminded of the other “home” that so many Irish women were forced to remain in — mother and baby homes. The lack of control Irish women had over their reproductive rights up to so recently is yet another link.
Laura Cahillane, a senior lecturer at the University of Limerick, who addressed the assembly on this issue, has said the original idea of putting it in the Constitution was not to restrict women to the home or prevent them from working.
The idea was to allow women to remain in the home and provide financially for them to do so. The problem is that no policy was ever put in place, and women never developed an economic right to remain at home and care for their family.
We will have to wait and see whether it is a simple deletion that the citizens voted for, or an amendment through a referendum which would recognise the value of care in our society.
This would be a wonderfully evolved step, but any such recommendation would be viewed as utterly eye-watering by those in charge of the national purse strings.
My problem is that if the citizens go for this “optimal” proposal, the financial cost will mean that it simply never happens, and those ridiculously old-fashioned and damaging sentences will never be removed from our Constitution.
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