Professor Mary Murphy:

There are theoretical models of how to envisage this. We tend to have a commodified approach where we expect both parents to find care in the marketplace and both to work full time. A different way of thinking about that might be two three-quarter jobs as the societal norm, where both expect to play some role in the home and to work for a certain amount of time. They would also access some care in the care infrastructure that is available.

I would like to think that is where we could be shifting, but a lot of policy, including working time policy, welfare policy, taxation policy and care policy, needs to be going in the same direction. I believe that is what Senator Higgins was talking about when she spoke about that macro welfare imagination. It is a question of what the compass is pointing towards. We have many good policies but we do not join them up in a vision of what we are trying to create as a culture or an ethic around care. That is missing from the conversation sometimes, as is what the goal of all this is. Is the goal a gender-neutral distribution of care between the family, the State and the market? If it is, what do we need to do? If we know where we are going, it is easier to start talking about how we get there.