In the early 1980s, to coincide with a general election, the Women's Political Association ran a campaign called "Why Not a Woman?" writes Mary Raftery.
With woolly political naïvety, it exhorted us to vote for women simply because they were women. If we only had more women in power, the world would be a better place. Or so it argued.
One glaringly unavoidable answer to its "why not?" question at the time was Margaret Thatcher. These days in Ireland, there's another one, and it's Mary Coughlan, Minister for Social and Family Affairs.
"Thatcher the milk snatcher", as she was dubbed after her cutback of milk provisions for school children, had early in her career signalled that the British prime minister could be as hard-nosed as any man. Mary Coughlan may well go down in Irish political annals as the scourge of widows, for very similar reasons.
Coughlan is saving €6 million by eliminating the availability of half-rate disability, maternity and unemployment benefits to widow/ers and lone parents. This specifically targets working widow/ers and single parents, who pay full PRSI (albeit minus the 2 per cent levy), and will now no longer be entitled to receive what they have already paid for through these insurance contributions. It is estimated that 2,000 people a week will have their incomes slashed by this cut, one of the so-called "savage 16" in the area of social welfare.
This has been presented by Ms Coughlan as a "reform" of the system. Women who have the misfortune to be pregnant when widowed, and claim their entitlement to maternity benefit, or those who become ill or lose their jobs and claim their allowances, are in the view of the Minister now categorised as "anomalies" in urgent need of reform.
The argument is that as they already get either a widow/er's pension or a lone-parent allowance, they should not be entitled to double benefits. However, this is not a matter which is in the gift of the Minister. It is an entitlement which has been paid for by each working widow/er and lone parent concerned through their PRSI contributions. To add insult to injury, they will now have to continue paying the same level of PRSI while receiving hugely reduced benefits.
The Minister's argument on this is not even consistent. Take the case of blind widows and widowers. They will continue to receive their full and just entitlements to both a Blind Person's Allowance and their widow/er's pension. Even Ms Coughlan clearly balked at removing that particular double benefit.
There is in addition a compelling case to be made that widow/ers and lone parents should actually be entitled to full unemployment, disability and maternity benefits, rather than the measly half-rates which they have been able to claim until now. Instead they're to get nothing.
The history to all of this is peculiar. The entitlement to half-benefits in addition to the widow's pension goes back several decades. It was removed in 1988 by then minister for social welfare, Michael Woods, for reasons identical to those being used by the current Minister. However, it was restored two years later by Mr Woods, who was facing a court challenge on the issue. At that stage he brought working widow/ers and lone parents into the PRSI net.
The argument then was that as they were now paying insurance, they were entitled to appropriate benefits (but still at half-rates only, for reasons that were never properly explained). However, at the time (1990), Michael Woods said in the Dáil that he considered the restoration of these benefits "as particularly important and is something they [the widows] wanted. It can be quite important to a widow or a deserted wife that she can get disability benefit if she is out sick."
What was the case in 1990 remains so today. The only difference is that we now have a different Fianna Fáil Minister, and a woman to boot. That a woman should attack them in this way was a cause of genuine puzzlement and hurt to the 100 or so widows who attended the National Association of Widows in Ireland (NAWI) meeting in Dublin last Monday.
Their expectation that a woman Minister might be more sympathetic to their plight is as naïve as the Women's Political Association's 1980s campaign. An insight into what motivates Mary Coughlan is to be found in The Women Who Won, a book written in 1993 by Una Claffey, who is now a special adviser to the Taoiseach. Asked why she was in politics, Coughlan said "I like the sense of power ... I like being known. I like going into Richard Alan's to buy a suit and feeling half way guilty and at the same time knowing I really need it."
Why not a woman, indeed.
The reality, of course, is that the issue here has nothing to do with gender. It is about carefully selecting and targeting the weakest sections of society, those least likely to be able to defend themselves against these kinds of assaults. As one woman said on RTÉ's Liveline last week, with the kind of grants going these days, you're better off being a horse in Ireland today than a widow.