Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am very glad to have the opportunity to speak on this Bill and possibly on the one later on the proposed amendment to the Constitution on families, gender and care. I was very proud to be part of the Oireachtas committee which took on the work of the citizens' assembly. I first of all want to thank all of the citizens who contributed to that excellent piece of work and who gave up their time through Covid. I have met a number of them subsequently as part of the committee and I know that they also got a lot from the process, as well as having given so much to the State in their effort.

I also thank Deputy Bacik for chairing the committee which we all engaged in over a period. It was a very important piece of work and we managed to do a great deal of work on domestic violence, on equality and on care principles more broadly. It was a very constructive piece of work.

Without wishing to go through the committee working again I always, from the outset, expressed a more reserved view of what was possible by way of constitutional drafting. That, of course, was built on my experience of the children's committee back in 2008, 2009, 2010 and the subsequent process to try to draft the amendment for Article 42A. This committee is not the first which produced constitutional wording. The all-party Oireachtas committee on children did the same and it has been my view from the outset that having gone through that committee process with former Deputy Alan Shatter into the Attorney General's office with the then Minister, Frances Fitzgerald, who took it forward, that these wordings were very different constructs and what would come out of the Attorney General's office would ultimately have a different lens to what we agreed at committee. Our best options at committee were to get the principles which we wanted there together with the strongest language we could agree on. The House will recall that in private I expressed concern again and again on different words.

In particular, I expressed concern with on the concept of care in the community, not because I am against it in any sense, but because of how it was defined constitutionally and understood. What I see here between the two referendums, as I go through them, is that I look for the principles which I want to see in society and how they might be expressed in the Constitution and I ask myself who does this deliver for and what are we going to achieve by the people of Ireland passing this referendum. I look at it and I think the combination of the two referendums delivers for families not based on marriage where in a way they have been systematically excluded because of the constitutional position. That would no longer be the case. To my mind, the asking of that question and the getting of a positive answer from the people is a good thing. It will have a practical impact for those families which I see as desirable and so I completely support that approach. We may talk about the wording and the different ways of coming to it. The House will recall that we try to have the most minimalist approach possible. Okay, that is fine, but at the end of the day I ask myself if this is going to deliver for different forms of families which are not based on marriage, and I believe it will.

I then ask myself if it will deliver for women and if it is a genuine step forward for women.

To my mind, if the outdated sexist language that places me in the home, as a constitutional concept, is to be deleted, that is good and something I want to vote for. I want the people of Ireland, not just the women of Ireland, to vote for it. I have spent time in the home as a family carer and I have spent time in universities and the Oireachtas. I, like so many others, have multiple experiences from different stages in life, but the Constitution identifies me, Deputy Bacik and other Deputies across from me, with all our experience, as having a position in the home when clearly we are here doing something very different. It is important that the constitutional measure go. That would be an important statement on behalf of the women of Ireland. I hope the question is both asked and answered in the positive. The change would not diminish the position of women or remove them. It would do no such thing. Arguments to that effect are red herrings that may come up in a referendum campaign. We will deal with them at the time, but it is important to make this point at the outset.

The concept of care, which I might come back to when we debate the fortieth amendment, comprises the hardest part. To go back to first principles and temporarily forget about our dialogue to date, we should ask ourselves whether the new expression of care in the Constitution is good or bad. To my mind, it is good. Would we have liked to go further and say other things that I have always said were not constitutional concepts? I will come back to constitutional concepts. I always said the concepts in question were not constitutional and I just did not understand how they could be expressed constitutionally in the way we were describing them. Is the expression of care a good thing for an evolving society expressing compassion towards its people? I believe it is. It is very positive and is a reflection of our values – our very much evolving values. It is an expression of our compassion. It is really beautiful to reflect the care people show for each other in families and more broadly, in the same way that we reflect the idea of education. We do not necessarily refer to teachers in the Constitution but do refer to the premise of education and to education being a thing that we do in families and more broadly. These are good concepts that are very important to reflect.

On the other constitutional concepts, the first word that jumped out at me was "durability", as I suspect it did at Deputy Bacik. It is not a constitutional concept that I have ever seen. I questioned what it meant. It is really important that we tease this through now because it is naturally going to be a question later. What is durability? Is it about commitment or enduring? What is the difference between a durable relationship between adults and an enduring relationship? I could be in a durable intimate personal relationship with somebody that lasts for ten or 20 years, and I could have an enduring friendship with somebody that lasts for 40 or 50 years. These are different relationships. There is something to be thought about in respect of the horizontal nature of adult–adult relationships. I do not believe this includes what Deputy Clarke said about people living together for a period and being in support networks. We can talk through this further on Committee Stage. I refer to a much stronger concept in respect of durability. Even the way the concept is phrased, referring to a foundation on marriage or other durable relationships, links it to intimacy and permanence.

There is also the question of the vertical nature of relationships, including the parent–child relationship. Nobody would say the latter is anything other than durable, whether it involves a mother and child or an unmarried father and a child. There is permanence and durability to such relationships that cannot be described as committed or in any other way. It is really important that we tease this out now and question what we really mean by durable rather than simply criticising the term and saying that, because we have never seen it before, it is bad. What are we trying to achieve? We are trying to achieve something that is related to marriage or something akin to marriage. I am referring to something – I do not want to use the word "durable" again – that has a measure of permanence, is stable and is a concept that is grounded and not to be unpicked easily. The best expression of that is the vertical parent–child relationship and what is around that.

The question of where grandparents come in does not even come into it because the State can step in and say in a care situation that the grandparent is not the correct carer and that there is not sufficient durability, because the State has another lever to intervene in that way. It is important that we talk and think this out. We may have the right word but I am not sure we have gone through this process enough.

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