Irish mothers are far less well provided for in terms of time with their children than mothers in Britain or on the Continent, writes Victoria White
Irish mothers are half as good as British mothers. While it's well worth it to an economy to let British mothers stay at home for the first year of their infants' lives, it would be a waste to give Irish mothers more than six months. The Irish babies would be bored and gagging for the creche.
Let's try that again, shall we?
The Irish Government's commitment to the mothers, children and new families under its jurisdiction is less than half as good as that of the British government to its charges - from last Sunday Britain has more than doubled the length of maternity leave, to one year. It has also instituted two weeks' paid paternity leave. Irish fathers get no paid paternity leave. What's more, it has given both parents of children under six the right to a family-friendly employment arrangement, unless their employer can prove it won't work.
Only six months of the maternity leave will be paid. But here only 18 weeks' leave is paid, and the remaining eight weeks unpaid. Comparisons are hard to make, but Ireland probably has the worst maternity and parental leave provision in the EU. A Danish or a Swedish mother can take about a year-and-a-half, a French mother more than two years, a German mother three.
We're in a surprising state for a country which spells out its commitment to a mother's life in the home in the Constitution. Or is that really a contradiction? We're still denying women rights. Once women were denied the opportunity to work outside the home, now they're denied the right to be at home even with their very young children.
And because we are still in recovery from being denied access to the workplace we haven't managed to articulate a new set of needs: those of mothers. At times the Irish equal rights lobby has a comical adherence to gender-neutral language. Plainly things have got out of hand when the Employment Equality Agency's New Mothers at Work study (1999) refers to "the specifically gender-related work of pregnancy."
The idea that a woman's pregnancy as just another bit of work which, by chance, only women can do is a lie, and lies will not help women. Motherhood transforms a woman biologically and psychologically. That doesn't mean it makes her incapable; it makes her astonishingly capable. She might have difficulty driving a tractor for a few weeks, but she's creating and nourishing a new human being.
Most people now accept that a woman deserves a few weeks "lying-in" while she has a baby. Few in Ireland accept or value the much longer period a woman needs with her child if they are both to embark safely on their new lives. One can argue for that time on the grounds that infants need to be breast-fed.
The World Health Organisation, endorsed by Irish health authorities, says that infants should be exclusively breast-fed for six months and that breast-feeding should, ideally, continue for two years.
The health benefits of breast-feeding are rich and wide and so often repeated that they have lost their impact. Here's a less often cited statistic: the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences estimated in 1989 that four in every 1,000 babies born in the US will die each year because they are not breast-fed.
Irish maternity leave allows for the first few vital weeks of breast-feeding. But what about the more shadowy issue of the child's psychological need of its mother? Research by Heather Joshi of the Institute of Education in London, included in the report of the British Childcare Commission to the British government (2001) reported a negative impact on children if their mothers worked full-time when they were under a year old.
This information must have helped build the case for today's maternity leave boost in the UK, which shows how untrue it is that spelling out the importance of motherhood undermines women's rights. If you minimise the importance of motherhood, you devalue women because they cannot wholly deny their biology.
Irish women are engaged in a terrifying struggle to compete as if they were not mothers and still be mothers. Both those who stay in the workforce full-time and those who opt out for ever pay a terrible price, and society pays the price over and over again.
The strongest argument that young children need their mothers is the majority of mothers in Ireland who conduct their own research and conclude that they need to give up work or, if they are lucky, negotiate part-time, flexible work. The reason for their "retirement" from the workforce is always explained by "the lack of affordable childcare", but that is not just an insult to the women in question, it is an insult to the intelligence.
There is much official research into working mothers but absolutely none that I can find on the majority of Irish mothers who are at home. However, in Britain, research in 2001 for the magazine Top Santé showed that only 4 per cent of mothers of pre-school children want to work full-time.
The desire which a majority of women feel to have time with their young children must be seen not as a weakness, but as a strength, and it must have political articulation. Then we might have some hope of getting what we need, an extended period of maternity leave, parental leave and the right to flexible working for both partners.
We can afford it. Before the last general election, Labour's Eithne Fitzgerald costed a €50-a-week subsidy for parents of children under three at €350 million. What about awarding a maximum of three times that but making it rigorously means-tested? What about channelling the €1,462,600,000 we spent last year on child benefit towards those who need it most: disadvantaged parents, parents of special needs children and parents of the very young?
Or else let's leave well enough alone. Irish mothers probably deserve to be twice as stressed as British ones and far, far more stressed than most of their European sisters. And as for Irish children? Sure what have they ever deserved?
Victoria White is writing a book on motherhood in Ireland