Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am saying that anybody who says that the Constitution did not want women to work or to have occupations or to be able to earn their livelihoods is wrong.It never said anything of the sort. People quote selectively from this document but it has to be read as a whole. It was not the case that Ireland said women should not work.

Having said that, I take Senator Higgins's point that there certainly was a general attitude that men were more suited for work and women were better suited for domestic existence. That was undoubtedly a general attitude in the early 20th century. That was undoubtedly the case. However, it was not just Ireland. People talk about the marriage ban in our Civil Service but it was rife across the English-speaking and German-speaking worlds for women to be treated in that way. The Constitution was not the origin of the grossly unfair rule that women had to give up their jobs in the Civil Service once they married. Even if, in the most appalling cases, they, for one reason or another, did not have children, they had to get out of the Civil Service because they were married. Those were awful rules but they were general across Europe.

I noted an article that referred to the subject to which Senator Higgins referred, that is, Kevin O'Higgins telling the Dáil in 1927 that women should be in the home rather than serving on juries. There was the mother and father of a row about that. This House objected to the removal of women from the role of jurors. A compromise was struck. Former Senator, Jane Wyse Power, and another Senator worked out a compromise that meant women would not be on the jury list automatically but were free to act as jurors if they wanted to do so and could put their names on the jury roll. It is interesting that the views of Kevin O'Higgins were of the kind that Senator Higgins has talked about but there were women in this House who kicked up an almighty fuss about that, stopped him in his tracks and forced him to back down to an amendment.

I talked about women being forced by economic necessity to work outside the home. Since everybody has taken to giving their own particular memories of earlier lives in this regard, I will say of my own mother, who was a qualified architect and opted to work only in our household, that with a friend of hers who was also a qualified architect, she became involved in the Civics Institute of Ireland in Dublin. The institute was a do-good, philanthropic body. It was an NGO, if you like. It ran crèches in the city centre of Dublin for working mothers. I remember going to see those crèches on occasion with my mother. Senator Mullen might not like me saying this but the strange thing was that they got a very cold shoulder from the Catholic Church-----