Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

There is a proposal to delete from the Constitution the infamous woman-in-the-home clause, a backward, reactionary, sexist, archaic piece of nonsense. Everyone who wants progress in this country will support the deletion of that clause without question. It has been in the Constitution for 87 years. It has taken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael 87 years to catch up and delete that backward clause, which was dictated by a Catholic archbishop, if not actually written by one. In any case, it is good enough that it is going.

As in the previous debate, we are debating a proposal for a bit of progress that is extraordinarily timid. What does the Government mix it up with? This is its proposed new wording:

The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.

I saw the Minister shaking his head when Deputy Murphy made the point that the word "strive" was very carefully and deliberately chosen, because it all adds up to no real commitment whatsoever. The Minister is shaking his head again. He should look the word up in the dictionary. It does not impose a legal commitment on him to deliver. There are plenty of people who on flicking the page on the calendar – maybe that is old-fashioned – from 31 December to 1 January, New Year's Day, or on doing so on their phones, made a new year's resolution to strive to lose a bit of weight or go off the alcohol, at least for the month of January. Some will succeed but many will not. Probably a majority will not. The wording does not give a commitment to reach the end goal, yet the Government decided on it deliberately and in a calculated way.

The wording "gives to Society a support", rather than "gives to the State a support", is deliberate. If it stated "gives to the State a support", it would, at the very least, strongly imply a legal obligation on the State with relation to improving the carer's allowance, childcare provision and rights thereto and improving care services for the elderly, people with disabilities and others. Therefore, the Government has quite deliberately not put itself or future Governments in a position in which they have a legal obligation. They should have a legal obligation regarding all I have mentioned.

When the Taoiseach was asked before Christmas, on 5 December, whether he would consider a wider definition of care that might benefit carers, he said the following:

It is something we gave careful consideration to. The first thing we are proposing is to delete the archaic sexist language in the Constitution with regard to a woman's duties in the home and to replace it with a new article which gives constitutional protection and recognition to care within the family. It does not necessarily have to be within the home but it does have to be family care. We took the view that family care is different. It is different to care provided in nursing homes or by commercial home care providers, for example. We took the view in the round that while it made sense to give constitutional protection and status within the family, extending that protection to commercial operations in the main, such as nursing homes and home care providers, would not have been the right thing to do.

When I read that, I noted the irony of it – the irony of those words ringing out today when the Government has just announced that home care assistants from outside the EEA will be excluded for a period we do not yet know from the new minimum rate of €30,000 a year for people with work permits. People who work in horticulture, meat processing and butchery and those who work as language skills specialists will get €30,000 per year but the home care assistants, who are professionals and who are mainly nurses, many from India, will be excluded for now. Why? It is because the Government has been asked to exclude them for now by the bosses in the nursing home industry. Nursing Homes Ireland, representing the for-profit nursing homes, asked the Government to leave these women out of the picture until such time as they are ready. It is interesting that representatives of Nursing Homes Ireland had a meeting with the Minister about this. The Minister granted them a meeting and asked them to come in on the basis of there being no issue.

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