It is less than a month since President Mary McAleese celebrated the affirmation of Irish femininity sponsored by the Rose of Tralee contest, and already Irish women are a global force. But the news that we might top the Miss World Poverty Stakes is hardly what the President had in mind.
While women in the US are reminded you can best enter the history books by having sex with a powerful man, Irish women look set to do so simply by remaining in the kitchen and keeping their mouths shut.
The Miss World Poverty Stakes is a hotly-contested lottery. Hundreds of countries line up before a panel of United Nations experts, boasting the kind of complicated vital statistics that make economists glow. The particular numbers that so endeared our brave new democracy to this year's Human Development Report are a testy mix of measurements, tied together under the category Gender Development Index, which in essence is a bureaucrat's version of how we look with the swimsuits off.
The point of this contest is cultural anorexia: how low you score in the achievement trials. The slimmer you are, the better you do. In the area of women's share of earned income, for example, not alone did Ireland do well, but we mercilessly beat to a veritable pulp countries you would have expected to do much better than us. Places like Papua New Guinea, Congo, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, El Salvador, Mali, both Republics of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and other reticent playgirls of the Third World who all earned more than us, proportionate to their menfolk.
It was desperately unexpected. We looked so surprisingly different with our kit off that our leaders are still blushing. The vital statistics of proud Irish femininity were beaten only by the likes of Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states. With a score of 26.8 per cent of earned income as opposed to 73.2 per cent for Irish men, we now prepare to share our tiara with our sisters in Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and India. The Government may send us flowers.
Herbs might be more appropriate: deadly nightshade (a.k.a. belladonna) could fit the bill. We could sit them on our kitchen windows and remind ourselves why we have been so wise to stay so silent. After all, there is a kitchen in the heart of every Irish woman, whether it be designer aluminium or an MDF shelf in a back room. Without the gender justice test, Ireland could be any other common-or-garden industrial country. This way we get to help bake the Celtic Tiger cake, while choking on the crumbs of the kind of humanity best practised in the Third World.
History has resisted the lure of women, in Ireland at least. If Ireland suffers from too much history, women here suffer from not enough, and everyone suffers as a consequence. "As far as history goes/we were never /on the scene of the crime," Eavan Boland wrote. We were, of course, but behaving with our customary modesty, we ensured we did not hog the limelight.
Exactly 80 years ago this December, the biggest change ever to Irish democracy was introduced, when the electorate was virtually doubled to include for the first time women aged over 30 years. Constance Markievicz became the first woman member of parliament ever, topping the poll in a Dublin inner-city constituency where men and women understood that gender politics was a luxury only wealthy people could afford.
THE Government has argued that the figures would be different had earnings and gender justice measures over the last three years been taken into account. Its arguments are unsupported by factual evidence.
No matter how piercingly we look at their class photos, we find it hard to see female bodies among all those suits. However critically we examine schemes for training and re-educating unemployed people, their own guide books confirm that many married women are excluded by virtue of their maritally-encumbered state.
Claims that this particular administration would enhance child-care facilities, help women working in the home to improve their status and create tax reliefs for working parents have been unfounded. The gap between rich and poor is imaged only by the increasing poverty of women citizens, despite the high-profile achievements of some. And as for enabling men to take up their human rights to parent children with the same legal support as women have, fatherhood here is a constitutional joke.
Moving away from the culture of blame, which enabled us to apportion responsibility to agencies like the Catholic Church, means moving towards a culture of taking responsibility as a series of communities. Yet the deepening fissure between rich and poor, already suggested in the evidence being collected for the forthcoming Combat Poverty/ESRI Report, is mirrored by an even wider financial fracture between men and women. This in turn translates into a series of power inequities that are, so far, too institutionally challenging to confront.
The attitudes which keep this State from repeatedly failing gender justice tests reflect what another female President called "The fours Cs" - culture, cash, confidence and children. Tinker around as it may, the State is doomed to failure for so long as success continues to be measured by economic indicators only, rather than by integrated approaches to economic and cultural development as applied by the UN Human Development Report.
Constance would have been shocked by the Miss World Poverty Stakes. She had figured that the new Ireland would deliver gender justice for all its people, rich and poor.
Few special measures would be needed to encourage modern Ireland in the right direction: Irish common sense would compensate for centuries of human exploitation. The poor would be nurtured and respected automatically. Irish men and women would set an example to the rest of the world. We are.
Constance never took her seat in parliament but she did laugh at the report that the powers-that-be had allocated her a hook for her coat. Good old Constance, misunderstanding the nature of service as she did, and dying worn out and before her time as a result. The wooden tray she lovingly hand-carved testifies to that with great craft: a long rectangle, but because the handles are set at each wide side rather than at the narrow ends, no one could ever carry it. The Royal College of Physicians in Ireland looks after it in her name.
Shall we celebrate this anniversary of democracy? There are no plans to do so as yet, even though the date is less than three months away.
As the Miss World Povery Stakes suggest, the message handed down to Irish femininity over years of recalcitrant legislation and the belief that time alone could heal old prejudices is personified not by the flaming torch of mass achievement, but by the unwieldy, hard-to-carry tray that symbolises service.