In computer game parlance there are ‘player characters’ and ‘non-player-characters’. The former are controlled by the humans playing the game, and the latter by the computer itself. The NPCs, in other words, do not control themselves.
The terminology easily translates into politics. There are government ministers who are player characters and ones who are NPCs. The ‘player characters’ impose their own agenda on whatever department they are running and if need be, will have showdowns with their civil servants.
The ‘NPC’ ministers do not impose their agenda, because often they have none. Instead, they allow their agenda to be set by their civil servants, maybe by their special advisors, and perhaps by outside NGOs as well.
Alas, Norma Foley, the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality, seems to fall into the NPC category and we had a good demonstration of why this week when she launched something called the ‘National Strategy for Women and Girls: Action Plan 2026-2028’.
The Strategy is a follow-up to the ‘National Strategy for Women and Girls 2025-2030’.
Both documents are partly the work of the National Women’s Council, and it shows. This is the same organisation that pushed on the Government the disastrous referendum of 2024 which proposed to remove the reference to the mother-in-the-home from the Constitution and replace it with a generic reference to ‘carers’. This was voted down by a resounding three-to-one margin.
On that same day, another referendum to include the very nebulous term ‘durable relationships’ in the Constitution was also shot down by two-to-one.
Both of these referendums were proposed while Roderic O’Gorman, now Green Party leader, occupied Norma Foley’s current post.
You would think those massive defeats would have chastened the Department a little and made it a bit wary of the National Women’s Council. But no, the ideology behind the referendums remains intact and is operating at full force in the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. The ideology in this case insists that deep down all women are basically the same and share the same dream. That dream is to have a fulfilling career. Any children they may have must be fitted in around that dream.
Indeed, the ideology insists not only that all women are basically the same, but that men and women are too. ‘Gender’, according to this ideology, is purely a social construct. That is to say, men and women only seem different because of how society forms us and gives us different expectations, for example, that women will mainly be carers and that men will mainly be in full-time paid work.
Educate us in the same way, and we will have identical expectations, says this theory, and it is why the National Strategy has the ‘patriarchy’ firmly in its sights. As it says: “Patriarchal norms, often focused on men as decision-makers and breadwinners and on women as carers, uphold harmful stereotypes and limit life opportunities, preventing women from pursuing particular career paths and economic opportunities and inhibiting men’s likelihood of engaging in caring roles for their children or dependants.”
For this reason, the ‘patriarchy’ must be demolished, starting in schools and via public education campaigns.
It also explains why the strategy has ‘tradwives’ in its sights. No girl must be permitted to aspire towards a life focused mainly on the home and not work.
The career woman, on the other hand, must be put on a pedestal. The social engineering could not be more blatant. The Strategy denounces society for moulding men and women in a particular way and then attempts to do precisely the same thing, except in this case by elevating the paid workplace far above the home. (We do get a passing reference to more workplace flexibility, but not much else on this score).
The best way to counter this strategy is to attack its underlying premise—that gender is strictly a social construct and that life choices result entirely from conditioning
One good place to look is Sweden where National Women’s Council-type thinking has dominated public policy and education for decades. In Sweden, has the gender pay gap been eliminated at long last? No, it has not. In fact, at 11.2pc, it is higher than in Ireland, where it is 8.3pc (which is lower than the EU average).
Why does the pay gap continue to exist? One reason is that Swedish women, like Irish women, are more drawn to part-time work and, crucially, to jobs that do not earn as much money on average as the some of the higher paid jobs men are still more likely to do (such as software engineering).
Swedish women remain far more likely than men to be found in what are broadly called ‘caring’ occupations such as teaching, nursing, child-care, elder-care and so on.
Men are still far more likely to be found in jobs that involve working with ‘things’, like engineering and truck-driving.
If, after all these years, Sweden’s feminist-dominated education system still hasn’t managed to eliminate the gender pay gap, or the fact that women are more likely to do part-time jobs, or that they are still much more likely to be the caring professions, then perhaps there really are natural differences between the sexes that can never be finally erased.
Instead of forcing men and women into a uniform, career-dominated mould that treats the home as an afterthought, the Norma Foley-fronted National Strategy for Women and Girls should value domestic and professional life equally. A better approach would respect the individual choices men and women make regarding their ideal work-life balance and not choose sides.
If the end result is that a residual gender pay gap remains, that women are still more likely to be in part-time work, and in the caring professions, and even (God forbid), at home with their children, then so be it. It is not the job of the Government to force women, or men, into roles they do not want.
But if the Government does think that this is its job, then it will be the Government, and not the ‘patriarchy’ that is seeking to limit our “life opportunities”, and by deliberate design. Is this really what Norma Foley wants?