Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Where is the State's obligation in this? Where is the community's obligation in all of this? Where is the social responsibility for people who have disability, to vindicate their rights? Senator Clonan talked about people with disability, and for him, this will be the only constitutional provision for people with disability. It is being sold on that basis. It is a kind of a mishmash that is being sold on the basis that this is where the State provides, in its fundamental law, for the whole issue of care. It restricts care to that kind of care that is given by one member of a family to another by reason of their bonds of loyalty.

The arguments Senator Clonan has advanced are not met in any way by this particular few lines. It does not even commit the State to much. The provision states it will assist members of families who provide care to each other. It does not even say it will assist them; it says it will "strive" to do so. It is, therefore, virtually unenforceable in any shape or form. One cannot go down to court and say, "You are not striving hard enough", or, "You are giving too many funds to the Arts Council; you should be giving it to home care", or, "You are giving too much money to acute hospitals when home care needs more". Nobody can go down to the Four Courts and say to a judge, "Tell the Government to shift that money from A to B". We have €20 million to waste on a referendum, and not even that can be appropriated for care by a High Court judge.

I entirely agree with Senator Clonan. This is the only provision in the Constitution to deal with care. It has no social dimension to it other than the family dimension. It has no wider application other than the kind of care that family members give to each other. Senator Clonan told us of his apprehension about what happens when he and his wife pass on and their son will be dependent on the community for care. He was told by a HSE person that his son has a sister. How bad is that? That is the type of care that we are putting into our Constitution, family to family, and we are saying that is the sum total of the Constitution's provision for care.

That is what we are putting in this new chapter. I make to make a few comments on what we are taking out. I accept that the gender-specific reference to mothers of children, "máithreacha clainne", is probably reflective of other days. If it had simply been "tuismitheoirí" or "tuiste", who could have argued with it? Who would have argued that the life of parents in the home, and - I want to use the language carefully - that the duties of mothers could be argued with if they refer to the duties of parents in the home? However, we have now a sort of rights-based culture where everybody believes in rights and very few people like to even use the term "duty" anymore, except to apply it to the State or to society in general. The Constitution, as Senator Mullen said, provides that the duties of parents under Article 42 are not just simply to care for their children but to develop their children's personalities, to educate them and to develop their social and moral formation. It is not just care. It is not just somebody coming in to care in the house, like a professional childminder or something. This is much more substantial than that.

If we were really worried about removing something demeaning, or allegedly demeaning, to women from the language of Articles 41 and 42, three words were all that was enough to change it. That is "parents", and "parents of children", where they appear in the text. We are dealing with something more than that. We are dealing with virtue signalling and we are saying that we reject the closed Catholic ethos of the 1930s, which had so many negative consequences for many people in terms of social policy. We have to remember that when we are talking about "máithreacha clainne", this was a society in which the Catholic Church had 96% dominance, and it was telling every mother, poor or rich, that it was her duty to have as many children as she could. I am talking about women in the slums of Henrietta Street, Dorset Street and the like. They were lectured from the pulpit to keep producing children. Where their husbands were insufficiently involved in the home, those women had to leave tenements, where the whole family was in one room, and go out and act as charladies and so on or do other work, leaving the eldest children in charge of the younger children. In those days, it was considered that there was a great moral danger to children, especially poor children who were left in those circumstances. This guaranteed that mothers would not be forced out by economic necessity. It had a very different context. It was not aimed at the middle classes or at people who had career choices. It was aimed at people who had no choice.

This document does not say anywhere that a woman's place is in the home. One of the things I find fascinating is that people ignore other bits of it. Article 45.2.(i) obliges the State "to direct its policy towards securing -

That the citizens (all of whom, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood) may through their occupations find the means of making reasonable provision for their domestic means.

Anybody who says that the Constitution states women should not work ignores what is written in it, which is that men and women were equally guaranteed the right to make provision for themselves by way of their work.