The State has long shown contempt for mothers: Vote No to that on Friday

Red FM is a popular radio station in Cork, and its presenter Niall Prendeville, who hosts a busy phone show, spent the last couple of mornings taking calls from listeners on the two referenda taking place this Friday.

One proposal, the ‘care’ referendum, seeks to remove provisions which protect the value of the work women do in the home, while another wishes to add the undefined phrase “durable relationships” to the article on protections afforded to families.

Prendeville said on yesterday’s show that he was surprised to see that so many of the responses on the station’s social media pages were opposing the proposals – and that this was also reflected in calls to the programme. He noted that while a vote on Facebook was obviously an unscientific poll, the comments were “overwhelmingly no” –  and added “pretty much every single call so far has been for a No No,” at one stage in the show.

He also said that the show had contacted SocDems leader Holly Cairns to discuss the YesYes position and she did not accept that invitation.

The women I listened to who phoned in were articulate, cogent, informed – and most of them were mothers. At times, their anger at the open contempt the state and the establishment has long shown for the absolutely critical and essential role of mothers was evidently a driving force in their oppositon to the proposal to delete all mention of them from the constitution.

My children are older now, but I well remember when they were small and I was a full-time mother how grating the lack of respect or appreciation for women working at home was. Sometimes it was more akin to open hostility: the sneering in media commentary about women’s brains being wasted minding children when there were glass ceilings to be smashed, and the corporate vision of society as a collection of tax-paying economic units to uphold.

It didn’t matter that surveys showed that a huge majority of women wanted to be at home with their children when they were small, because our children are actually more important to us than the approval of the harpies in the National Women’s Council, or a pat on the head from some UN body which thinks women are only fulfilled if they are measured in terms of their climb up the corporate ladder.

A recent Amárach poll showed that a whopping 69% of Irish mothers would prefer to be at home with their children rather than go out to work if money was no issue – with 70% of mothers saying they do not feel valued by society for their work as mothers.

Of course they don’t feel valued: the 2022 annual report from the National Women’s Council – pumped full of taxpayer funds to represent women – doesn’t mention the word ‘mother’ once. The discourse around mothers at home raising children and securing society’s future is generally disrespectful and ignorant and often downright toxic.

It hasn’t mattered that most women are perfectly happy to return to work or training when the kids were older: the thrust of the national discourse, for as long as I’m alive, has been that this full-time mothering lark is only for the dull and the unambitious, when the very opposite is true.

The left have always been too stupidly wedded to what they fail to recognise is a right-wing, profit-driven idea of progress to see that most mothers don’t relish the exhausting treadmill of being forced to rise in the dark and drop a small baby off at créche before sitting in traffic for an hour to get to work, and then repeating that all over again in the evening – with these Herculean efforts leaving just enough to pay your mortgage. The inevitable outcome has been fewer children and now a fertility crisis which means we may all be working until we’re 70.

Then there were the ferocious and wholly discriminatory economic penalties: Fianna Fáil, with one finger raised to Dev’s constitution, introduced tax individualisation which forced families where one parents was full-time at home to pay thousands every year in additional taxes.

Since the vast majority of parents at home are women, it is a punishment meted out to mothering, pure and simple. Yet there has been nothing but silence from the NWCI on that discrimination.

I’ve always found a great comradeship amongst mothers: whether working full-time, part-time or in the home. We’re all joined in that loose fellowship of muddling through the sleepless nights and the exhaustion and the general nagging worries – and, on the flipside, the sloppy kisses from toddlers and the special love of family wrapping around the special and unique joy your children bring.

In general, women aren’t looking to denigrate each other, and in general we all recognise that the work of raising a child is infinitely more important than gender quotas in the workplace or achieving business targets.

And the Constitution recognises that. As numerous experts, including Supreme Court Judge Marie Baker, the Chair of the Electoral Commission, has clarified, Article 41 does not say “a woman’s place is in the home,” but instead states that mothers provide an “important support” to society and shouldn’t be forced out to work due to “economic necessity”.

On Neill Prendeville’s show, Catherina, a nurse and a mother tackled the framing of the current debate around the word ‘duties’ in the Constitution. Article 41, she said, recognised the value of the work done by mothers – and supported that choice for women, a support of parents’ rights and duties she said other constitutions also recognised.

“The astronomical cost of living” she said, was preventing families from having real choices, and she pointed out that she had duties as a mother in the same way that she had duties as a nurse towards her patients.

She is part of a “Women and Mothers United” group who say they want all women to have a choice between going out to work or staying at home. They argue that Article 41.2 tries to protect this choice, but that the State has failed women and families because they have failed to uphold that constitutional right.

The constitution “gives me acknowledgment,” another woman, Aoife, said on the programme – adding she felt the government’s proposal was an “attack on motherhood”, and that families were already unsupported by the state in having and raising children.

She’s correct. The outright contempt, and the tax penalties, women endured from the establishment because we prioritised our role as mothers, should have led us to storm the Dáil long ago. But we were too busy raising the kids, I suppose.

On Friday, we can stand up for our rights and our choices by voting No to this mother-deleting proposal. Given that we’ve had 30 years of misinformation regarding what the Constitution actually says, it might be the case that disinformation wins the day. But I’ll be voting No nonetheless.