A live-in nanny is privy to family secrets and the parents' relationship with her can be emotionally charged, writes Fionola Meredith
The traditional nanny - stout-shoed, broad-bosomed, prim-lipped - is no more. No longer do parents turn to such stalwart ladies to provide their offspring with a sound moral upbringing and a set of nice clean fingernails. In some circles, the spinsterish guardian of the nursery has been replaced by a new breed of celebrity nanny - one who likes to wear Dolce & Gabbana and zip around town in a Cherokee Jeep, rather than opting for a cup of Ovaltine and a nice early night.
A glimpse into the lives of these Versace-clad nannies and the families who employ them has been provided by nanny Joy Fahy's court case against Dolores O'Riordan (lead singer with the Cranberries) and her tour manager husband, Don Burton, which ended this week.
In the High Court Fahy had alleged breach of contract, negligence and breach of duty and, in the case of Burton only, false imprisonment. She lost all of those claims but won an award of €1,500 because of the condition of her personal belongings, including clothing, when they were returned to her. Mr Justice Quirke turned down the claims by Fahy that she was to be provided with a new Cherokee jeep and a lump sum of €10,000 on termination of her employment.
Colourful allegations concerning the private life of O'Riordan and her family were made during the course of the trial. Fahy - who had previously worked for U2 drummer, Larry Mullen - weaved a bitter narrative about her time with O'Riordan and her family, depicting a paranoid, hysterical mother and a reckless father fond of drinking. Both parents rejected the picture Fahy painted of their family life.
Bizarrely, Fahy alleged that O'Riordan indulged in obsessive ironing, sometimes pressing the same items over and over again. The nanny also claimed that, during a trip to Canada, Burton took the couple's 18-month son, Taylor, on a jet ski without a lifejacket but with a can of beer in his hand. Burton denied this.
Now Fahy faces a legal bill of up to €300,000 after she was ordered yesterday to pay costs for both sides. Fahy has said she will appeal the case.
The trial has demonstrated just how up close and personal a nanny's role is in the family. And that's the case regardless of whether the family in question are fabulously wealthy. When the front door closes on the rest of the world, a live-in nanny is still there, a silent witness to dubious habits and odd behaviours. A nanny occupies a strange, schizoid position in the family structure - on the one hand, she's a valued intimate, entrusted with the care of precious offspring; on the other, she's a paid employee, a stranger whose devotion, loyalty and discretion are commodities we purchase.
Rebekah Lyons, managing director of Executive Nannies, an agency which has supplied nannies to some of the most famous parents in Ireland, is surprised O'Riordan and Burton did not have a formal contract with Fahy: "Most high-profile families insist on a very detailed contract with their nanny, covering all aspects of the post such as hours, pay and termination agreements. And a very tight confidentiality agreement is standard practice."
Despite the apparently glamorous nature of the celebrity nanny's job, Lyons says that these women pay a heavy price: "It's really a very stressful position - the job usually involves a huge amount of travel - and any parent with young children knows how difficult that can be. And as a 'celebrity nanny' you are also responsible for the security of the children under your care. Basically, you have to be prepared to sacrifice your own personal life to the demands of the post."
Even the perks which come as part of the package - an apartment, a car - go with the job, and have to be relinquished once the nanny's contract comes to an end.
So it's not surprising that the relationship between parents and their nannies is often loaded with unspoken tensions, anxieties and resentments. Most volatile of all is the mother-nanny axis of power, described by American commentator Caitlin Flanagan as "a relationship that is in many ways more intense - more vexing, more rewarding, more vital, more fraught - than a marriage". In the US magazine, The Atlantic, Flanagan identifies the uncomfortable fact that mothers "want to be totally liberated to take jobs, but we really want children to have the same intense bond with us that they used to have with middle-class moms who stayed home."
"The precise intersection of many women's most passionate impulses - their profound, almost physical love for their children and their ardent wish to make something of themselves beyond their own doorstep - is the exact spot where nannies show up for work every day. There isn't a nanny in this world who has not received a measure of love that a child would rather have bestowed on his mother."
And if guilt and uncertainty are par for the course for mothers, hiring a nanny can exacerbate rather than relieve these feelings. Katherine Mansfield's short story Bliss describes Bertha, a young mother observing her formidable nanny tend to her child: "She stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich girl with the doll." Many women experience similar pangs of nanny-induced envy, displacement and resentment.
Siobhann (38), a mother of two under-fives, had no idea how many conflicting emotions she would experience when she hired a nanny to care for her children. "I love my kids, but I was going mad cooped up in the house day after day - to be honest, I was getting depressed. So taking on Ana seemed to be the ideal solution - I could take on part-time work, have a little 'me' time. I felt a bit guilty at first - I'm not working out of financial necessity - but Ana is wonderful with the boys. They adore her - she'll read them endless stories, play tedious games for hours. She's really competent and safety-conscious too, I've no worries there.
"It's just that, because she's such a model of patience and good fun, I come a pretty poor second - and I can't help feeling slightly jealous. I never thought I'd feel this territorial and reactive: I mean, it's embarrassing - I'm a grown woman! But there are times when I really resent the fact that my kids seem to feel more attached to her than to me."
Despite Siobhann's difficult emotional response to her nanny, she is fortunate in having landed herself a "practically perfect in every way" Poppins-esque specimen. Nanny horror-stories abound, and many nanny-recruitment websites are now devoting sections to "Halls of Shame", where the sins of nasty nannies are spelt out in intricate detail. Aside from the deeply disturbing accounts of children being harmed by nannies, these sites provide an opportunity for outraged parents to let off steam about unscrupulous nannies whose only attributes were "lying, being lazy, being depressed and complaining", or those who took advantage of parents' daytime absence to dress up in their employers' underwear, or those who were caught snogging the man of the house in the utility room.
For most parents, hiring a nanny, childminder or au pair is an economic necessity rather than an indulgence. Yet child psychiatrist Robert Shaw's influential book on bad parenting, The Epidemic argues that this trend is damaging our offspring. He believes that today's children are spoiled little whingers, growing up as morally bankrupt individuals due to lack of input from distant and unavailable parents.
According to Shaw, the shift from one parent working outside the home to the new paradigm where both Mum and Dad are absent for most of the day has stolen parental time from children. And while the care provided by the nannies we employ in our absence may be good, it can never be better than the care and attention of a child's own parent.
Rosalind Miles, author of The Children We Deserve echoes aspects of Shaw's argument in her criticism of "quality time" - the precious hour or two before bed when working parents can do a bit of intensive bonding: "The mind of a child moves rapidly from moment to moment: a three-year-old cannot save for the parents' pre-determined hour of 'quality time' all the unforced questions and observations that in themselves constitute the 'quality' side of parenting, and lift the whole process from a chore to a joy. From the request 'How does a baby get in there?' to the dreamy demand, 'Why didn't God turn the moon all the way on tonight?' - these are the moments of intimate trust and truth on which later mature communication can be built."
However Caitlin Flanagan believes the real victims of the nanny system are not children or their parents but the nannies themselves. She reminds us that the liberation of professional-class mothers from the drudgery of housework and childcare has come at the expense of the (often) poor, immigrant women they've bought in to take on the traditional mother's role.
An ex-nanny shares Flanagan's view: "I got out of the profession because most families do not offer benefits of any sort, the pay is barely subsistence level and there is never going to be any retirement provision."
It's true that there is very little job security as a nanny: unlike in former times, where nannies tended to remain with the employing family well past child-rearing days, most modern nannies move from job to job quite frequently, encouraged by parents who are keen to reduce childcare expenses.
Flanagan remarks: "Raising a small child is so intimate, and the care itself produces a bond of tremendous intensity. That's what's so morally vexing about this: professional-class women are buying this love when they need it, as though it were a commodity, and then firing the nanny when they don't need her service, her love, any more - how can that be right?"
The acrimonious O'Riordan/Fahy case demonstrated just how emotional and fraught childcare arrangements can become. Yet one certainty emerged from the heated courtroom exchanges that gripped the public interest with their salacious detail: money can't buy you love. But maybe a Cherokee jeep can.