Irish Examiner View: Time to end hypocrisy of inadequate maternity provision

Covid-19 has pushed working from home to the top of the agenda for most of those who can do so.

Barack Obama’s memoir of his first term as America’s president is on course to be one of the best-read political memoirs this century. 

A Promised Land will be stuffed into thousands of Christmas stockings — big stockings, as it is not a succinct recalling. It will inevitably be read through the prism of his charisma and early promise. That his White House terms were bookended by two very different opponents is significant too.

One of his themes is how almost every good intention is winnowed by compromise, how the most powerful office in the world is constrained by circumstances, and the need to reach a workable consensus with most, though not all, stakeholders. 

Obama acknowledges this, expressing some, though not backbone-strengthening, frustration at how his idealism cannot always deliver ideal outcomes, especially on the great bank implosions of 2008 or universal health insurance. 

His lesson on the limits of power seems honest but then so too does the argument that unused — or misused — power engenders cynicism and undermines already-wavering faith in the reliability of democracy.

If, in 2008, Obama faced huge challenges his global successors face greater ones. 

The pandemic and all its consequences; accelerating climate collapse; the overshadowing of liberalism by darker forces and, especially in an Irish context, Brexit. That long, depressing list can be transfixing and offer distractions from more, fixable, day-to-day problems. 

Which, when those solvable problems are long-fingered, feeds the detachment that leads to an incapacity to deal with the bigger problems. One of those challenges — Covid-19 — has brought the changing nature of work into sharper focus. 

Already changing in unimagined ways because of automation and ever-more-powerful corporations, the pandemic has pushed working from home to the top of the agenda for most of those who can do so. Numbers have trebled, up from 200,000 early in the year to around 700,000 today.

That trend will continue, despite last week’s uninspiring Dáil debate on the unambitious Working from Home (Covid-19) Bill. But, should we be surprised? Today we publish analysis of how our maternity leave provisions are inadequate. 

Ireland’s entitlement is, at 42 weeks, almost double the EU average of 21.9 weeks. However, entitlement and possibility are propositions of a very different colour because we are one of Europe’s very worst countries when it comes to paid leave, which is all that many families can afford. We provide for less than 10 weeks while Estonia offers the equivalent of 85 weeks.

Obama, no more than Taoiseach Micheál Martin, may not have been able to resolve the climate crisis or bring peace to the Middle East but we can, if there is a real will to do so, modernise our maternity and childcare provisions in ways that reflect real need and supports a cohort of citizens already carrying a disproportionate burden. 

Doing so would cost a fraction of the vast sums consumed by Covid-19 and would have a hugely positive lasting in this society — one all too quick to shout from the rooftops about the centrality of the family in our culture. Why not make that idea real?