Hooray for Irish dads. They are doing more of the childcare, more of the housework, more of everything in fact. Kathryn Homlquist comes to praise fathers, not to bury them

It's become normal, in some social situations, for working women to put their partners down for being inadequate in the domestic sphere. The slagging can be vicious, and you sometimes wonder if it's her man's performance with a Hoover that the woman is actually talking about.

Yet many men seem to put up with the put-downs. It's like they've accepted the received wisdom that they don't do enough around the home, with food preparation, child-minding, child-counselling and general parenting.

This attitude is totally self-defeating for working women. A new survey gives us all a wake-up call concerning the real work fathers do in the home, although I have to admit I'm interpreting the results differently than those who conducted the survey.

"Fathers and Mothers: Dilemmas of the Work-Life Balance" was conducted by the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies at Trinity College Dublin, in co-operation with university researchers across Europe. It was funded by the Government and the European Commission.

When you and your partner are trying to sleep, after a hard day's work and parenting, who struggles out of dreamland to pick up the crying baby? In two out of five Irish families, it's the mother; in one in five it's the father, according to the report. Mothers and fathers overlap, so many couples are actually sharing the duty.

Sixty-four per cent of Irish fathers say "both of us" pick up the crying child. Yet only 57 per cent of mothers agree. So there's a seven per cent gap where fathers think they're doing something that mothers haven't noticed. So who is right, the mother or the father? The report thinks the mothers are right.

Mothers are still "doing the bulk of the domestic work", according to the survey, and fathers are "over-reporting" the amount of work they do. But hold on. Look at it another way. Maybe mothers are over-reporting the work they do and under-reporting the work that fathers do. We all know the syndrome where he does the washing up, then she does it again because it wasn't good enough.

I think it's wonderful that nearly one in five fathers is always waking to comfort the crying child. It's laudable that two-thirds of fathers see night duty as a joint responsibility and regard the rigours of parental sleep disturbance as routine. Irish fathers are amongst the most likely in Europe to see waking up in the middle of the night as part of their paternal responsibility. (To put Irish fathers in context, in France, 64 per cent of fathers say both parents awaken, but in Italy this is 51 per cent and the average for all countries is 60 per cent.)

So let's talk about the efforts that working fathers are making and stop whinging. Maybe if we started focusing on how committed working fathers actually are - and stopped complaining about the oppressed working mother - we might move beyond the gender war and start getting somewhere new. Maybe, if they felt appreciated, fathers would do even more.

Despite all our complaints about the decline in the quality of life under the Celtic Tiger, we've all learned something. We've learned that quality of life is important. That realisation is a luxury that only comes when you've got enough food to eat.

I'm beginning to think that our quality of life hasn't declined so much as our expectations have risen. Yes, sitting in traffic is a pain. But we're not working longer hours than parents elsewhere in Europe, although our childcare is considerably more expensive and our maternity and parental leave shorter.

What's really happened is that new generation of fathers and mothers have come to regard parenting as a joint responsibility and we want our working lives to reflect that. We've got higher hopes than previous generations of combining work and family and being happy in the process. Some women are turning this around by blaming fathers for not doing enough when it would be more productive to accentuate the positive and see how rapidly Irish working fathers have changed.

IN AT least half of Irish families, both parents work outside the home. In families with younger children, the figure is two-thirds. Lifestyles have changed for working fathers, almost as much as for working mothers. Fathers are spending more time with their children and want to spend even more.

Asked to rate the amount of additional child-time they wanted on a scale of one to five, Irish fathers answered 3.6 (the average for European fathers) and Irish mothers responded 4.0 (also the European average). That tells me that fathers take parenting as seriously as mothers do

Ninety per cent of fathers play with their children, compared to 90 per cent of Irish mothers. Now that's true equality in the most important "work" of all.

Three out of four Irish parents would like to have more personal time,unfettered by children, which is also the European average. So really, we're no better or worse off than other European parents in that regard. In fact, your average Irish father is a saint compared to a French one.

An admirable 50 per cent of fathers are under the impression that they are equally sharing meal preparation, shopping for food and managing home-life.

Their partners say otherwise. Could this actually be a communications gap, rather than a gender issue of oppression of working mothers? I'm beginning to think so.

Hooray for fathers. Working women have changed, but in the past decade, working men have turned into working fathers who have their priorities straight. It's about time we recognised that fact. If we praise fathers, rather than criticising them, more fathers will see that taking an equal share of parenting is worthwhile.

If you want to comment on anything you've read in the column, please email: kholmquist@irish-times.ie