Sir, – In his recent piece “Taliban-like marriage bar held back the nation’s economy” (Opinion, Business, September 22nd), John FitzGerald draws liberally from a “Maynooth University study” concerned with the longer-term impacts of the so-called “marriage bar”. As the authors of this study (published after peer review in the academic journal Economic and Social Review, 2020), we write to indicate that he has missed the main point of current relevance.
Although he mentions rightly some of the lasting consequences, these are trivial in comparison to the pension consequences for women discriminated against in this way. The marriage bar was effectively legally binding sex discrimination, introduced, supported and enforced by the Irish government, that required women employed in the public sector to quit their jobs upon marriage. This “policy” was mimicked in other sectors.
It directly created a group of women who did not have the minimum number of contributions needed to qualify for a (full) State pension, since their contributions ceased or stalled when they were required to quit their jobs when they got married. Our research based on data collected in the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (Tilda) suggests that most of these women left employment at relatively young ages (in their 20s) and many did not return to the labour market for many years (if at all). There is no doubt that that the reduced State pension payments caused by the marriage bar created hardship in terms of low income.
It is important to stress that the marriage bar is not some historical relic of academic interest and of no current importance. Given the rather late abolition of the marriage bar in the 1970s, it should not be forgotten that many of the women affected by it are still alive. Our calculations point to possibly more than 50,000 women in 2021.
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The Government has been aware of this “pension problem” for some time but is in a state of perpetual denial about it. For example, the pension consequences of the marriage bar were considered in the Government’s Green Paper on pensions published in 2007. This was followed by a consultation exercise in 2008 that received a large number of submissions about the effects of the marriage bar. It responded two years later, in the National Pensions Framework, by denying all responsibility: " . . . the Government cannot address shortcomings which have arisen from gaps in social insurance coverage in the past”.
In 2017, Minister of Finance Paschal Donohoe was asked to clarify the Government’s position on the pension consequences of the marriage bar. Mr Donohoe reinforced that the Government cannot compensate the women affected by the marriage bar. He also referred to the marriage bar as a “bonkers law”, and stated that “the way those women were treated was wrong”.
As every year passes, there are fewer and fewer women left affected by the marriage bar, with women in 2022 needing to be at least 65 years of age to be subject to this form of discrimination. Given mortality rates, in a decade or so, there will only be a small number of living victims of the marriage bar. The clock is rapidly ticking so action from the Government is needed to correct this wrong. The Government appear to be comfortable letting the pension problem created by the marriage bar die away as the women affected by it do the same. The Irish public should not be. – Yours, etc,
Dr IRENE MOSCA,
Maynooth University;
Prof ROBERT E WRIGHT,
University of Glasgow.