There is no cover-up. There has been a series of Cabinet committee meetings, and these are where things are teased out and discussed, and various options are looked at and considered, if that is what the Deputy is referring to.

The amendment is very basic. One of the key ones is that the definition around family should reflect current realities. That is all we are saying to people. I am sure Deputy McGrath is a man who believes in cherishing all of the children of the nation equally. A total of 42% of all children born in 2022 were born to an unmarried couple. Are we saying the Constitution should not reflect that? Are we saying they should be excluded from the articles of the Constitution? We are simply saying in that amendment that we want to cherish all of the children and all of the various family units, including couples with or without children, single parents and their children, and grandparents raising children. We are simply saying all of those should be covered by the new article - nothing more, nothing less. People are endeavouring to complicate it and raising all sorts of red herrings which I do not believe have real substance. This has been the motivation of the Oireachtas all-party committee as well. The idea with the amendment on replacing the duties of women in the home was to replace it with a provision that recognises care in the home, without discriminating on gender, in other words, care provided in the home by any member of the family, and that the State should strive to support that.

That is, in essence, what is before the people. It is modest but they are important changes to our own Constitution which I think are good ones and have been welcomed by many people who have felt excluded for far too long in our society. There has been much deliberation on these issues for three decades now, I would say. It has been the subject of various Oireachtas committees, and perhaps the most recent Oireachtas committee, which was chaired by Deputy Bacik, may have wished us to go further on the care dimension to it. Again, with respect to the separation of powers, it is important the Oireachtas and the Government of the day and of the future retain the parliamentary discretion to prioritise allocation of resources at budget time. That has been the essential nature of how we order things in the country, that we have a Constitution which provides for fundamental rights and is essentially a liberal, rules of law based document which gives a lot of rights to the citizen but also creates the Executive, which is the Government of the day, and the Parliament, to then work through the allocation of resources to the various areas of society: education, health and so forth.

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