Mothers working outside the home and lone parents have again been overlooked in the Budget, continuing confusion over the care of Irish children, writes Kate Holmquist
Three generations of women will tell you that the childcare crisis starts the minute the pregnancy test turns positive, but from a politicians' viewpoint, the childcare crisis began in March 2005 when commuting parents in Meath and Kildare vented their frustration over childcare costs.
No matter that 10 reports in as many years had warned of a brewing crisis, the demographics of two-career families paying high mortgages in suburbia finally hit voting patterns and politicians took notice.
Nine months later, the Government presented its solution: €1,000 in cash annually per every child under the age of six, whether or not their parents used childcare and regardless of parental income, so families earning more than €100,000 benefited equally with parents living at subsistence level on lone parents' benefit.
This measure has everything to do with optics when it comes to buying votes in the Meath/Kildare demographic and nothing to do with improving childcare quality or accessibility or even significantly reducing cost, since €19 per week isn't going to go far. And it disregards the needs of children aged six and older, whose childcare costs just as much and is just as important.
The Irish Childcare Providers Network, which includes children's rights advocates as well as providers, argued this year for direct investment in childcare provision itself: universal pre-school education for all three-year-olds and the extension of maternity leave to one year.
This child-centred view was aimed at improving the lives of the 200,000 children who are currently in childcare, as well as adding a year of education for those who are not.
The unquestionable long-term social value of pre-school education could have been provided at the same cost as the Government's give-away to parents of children under six.
The Government has warned that this development will take time. We will see universal pre-school education eventually: the Government is committed to it under the Barcelona targets, agreed by EU states; the director of the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education, Heino Schonfeld, has been enlisted to set necessary standards; and it is likely that the INTO will be involved in developing an early years education programme that will be incorporated into the evolving junior and senior infants curriculum.
As for the extension of maternity leave, the OECD has argued that at least one year is essential for the healthy development of children and that any less may be damaging, yet the Government provided only the minimum incremental increases.
This may be because in 2005, working mothers had no campaign, perhaps because they're too overwhelmed to argue their cause. Although Mary Robinson's comment that working Irish women are not fighting for their rights did hold water.
On the other hand, mothers in the home were a strong, vocal lobby in 2005, despite being vastly outnumbered by mothers working outside the home. The CSO found that 103,000 mothers of children under the age of six are employed outside the home compared with 63,000 devoted full-time to home duties. Yet one could easily believe the opposite was true, considering the media's focus on the mothers-in-the-home lobby.
The CSO's finding that 90 per cent of mothers working outside the home would not give up work if given the choice was ignored in most media coverage. These women lacked a voice, a point made by the National Women's Council's childcare report. European countries that have the best childcare provision, in terms of quality and affordability, also have more women in their parliaments and local governments. The fact that childcare provision in Ireland is among the worst in Europe goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Irish women are the most poorly represented in Government.
The results of the Meath/Kildare byelection, along with the raft of childcare reports published in the Republic this year, were an ideal opportunity for working mothers to mount a campaign for a real result, rather than the voter buyout that occurred in the Budget.
Instead, no sooner had the National Economic and Social Forum high-
lighted the disgraceful neglect of childcare services than the mothers-belong-at-home lobby hijacked the campaign, praising themselves for their devotion to their children and, by implication, damning women who chose to combine work and family. Once the "should mothers work?" debate began afresh, there was no stopping it, even though it was out of touch with Irish family life in 2005.
It was obviously disempowering of working women, preying on the guilt that most working mothers seem to feel when they have difficulty coping, rather than blaming the system that makes work-life balance too difficult.
The focus of the debate was stolen from where it should have been - the Government's failure to provide quality, affordable childcare, and was placed squarely on mothers.
Particularly disempowered were lone parents, 48 per cent of whom find themselves and their children at risk of poverty. Many young mothers are eager to get out to work so they can improve their own and their children's lives and futures.
OECD policy is to enable lone mothers to work, breaking the poverty cycle, yet nothing was done in the Budget to provide them with access to childcare.
One thing missing in the debate was sociological research into who stays home full-time and why. Many lone mothers remain in the home because they have no choice, but what about married stay-at-home mothers?
What do their husbands' earn, for example? Is the wife of a high-earning executive more likely to remain in the home to support her husband's status, his lifestyle, and to compensate for his own lack of work-life balance?
What are the educational qualifications of women who choose to be full-time mothers? The fact that one in five Irish mothers who are full-time in the home employ nannies and childminders didn't arise in the debate. Nobody seems too worried that these may be the mothers for whom €1,000 extra per year will mean another handbag in Brown Thomas.
The year ended without any vision of a State-supported childcare system in place. The people who benefited most were stay-at-home mothers, who got an extra €1,000 per year, despite having no childcare costs.
Stay-at-home mothers who look after other people's children also gained, since the first €10,000 of their income will now be tax exempt. Yet mothers working in creches did not get the same tax break, despite many being paid the minimum wage.
Whatever lip service it may pay to working parents, the Budget told a different story. This was a Government that wanted to support mothers and childminders working full-time in the home at the expense of the children of mothers working outside the home.
So, while the debate was supposed to be about childcare, it really was about a woman's place in the world and we still seem confused over what that should be, with our children paying the price for our indecision.