Ms Hilda Roche:

In the first instance, we support the position of the National Women’s Council of Ireland that this matter warrants an active and wide-ranging debate, with a focus on the intent of the wording relating to care and nurture and how that intent can best be articulated in the 21st century. We believe that the wording in the Constitution has been interpreted in a narrow and restrictive way rather than facilitating a rights-based approach, ensuring that the value of nurture and care would be resourced, supported and valued. We take the view that as it stands, the wording confined women to the role of unpaid homemakers, although even back in the 1930s this hardly reflected the reality of many women’s lives, whether in farming, family businesses or other work. Then, as now, thousands of women were also critical to the economic survival of families. The fact is that identifying women in their role in the home served to provide the basis for discrimination such as the marriage ban and differential wage rates for women and men. We reject any intent or interpretation that fails to recognise women as equal citizens and contributors to our society.

Today, we recognise increasingly the diverse roles of men and women within our families and intergenerationally. We also have a greater understanding of the shared and mutually enhancing roles of men and women in the caring responsibilities, whether of children or older relations, and in supporting healthy communities. At the level of the family, care responsibilities involve huge strain. We have not managed to create the correct infrastructure or an appropriate way of thinking about these realities as being equally important as economic sustainability and development. These are just a few observations we believe are relevant to a debate which should focus on care and nurture as a social necessity and an essential good. We would hope that a national conversation would pose many questions and provide for a real opportunity to consider questions such as these. Does the Constitution require a statement which endorses and underpins the value of families, and perhaps communities, as central to the support, care, nurture and development of us all? What difference do we want to make and what is required to realise that difference? How do we reflect the importance of men and women in the intergenerational care "contract" and is the Constitution the starting point? Do we need to be even more explicit about the equality of all citizens and the multiple roles that we all carry and have the potential to achieve? Go raibh maith agaibh as ucht éisteacht linn.