‘Cherchez la femme’ is an old French adage, a bit too sexist for our time so probably little if ever used today, which points to female manoeuvres behind the scene, usually when mischief is afoot.
Well, some of the more controversial proposals in Irish socio-economic life are being directed by a seen or unseen hand from the mostly publicly unaccountable though publicly-funded band of women called the National Women’s Council Ireland (NWCI).
They are deeply embedded, ideologically and institutionally, within the state and have become part of the apparatus of government itself. This has become more apparent in the recent initiative to fight back against ‘influencers’ who present the role of the stay-at-home mother in a positive light, implying that individual women need influencers – and counter influencers by inference – to tell them what’s best for their children and themselves.
But then none of this is about the wellbeing of children and families. It’s about the great levelling project that will carry us to Utopia. Having, quite correctly, identified the stay-at-home mother as the main stumbling block to the programme, we are being gas-lit into believing that no woman in her right mind would freely choose that role if state provided, accessible, ‘quality’, professional, childcare.
Women who resist, believing it’s in the best interest of their pre-school children to be cared for in the main by their mothers at home, are presented as the dupes of influencers who peddle glorified stereotypes of the home based woman. Again, how insulting to the huge numbers of women who declare in poll after poll their wish to care for their own babies and toddlers themselves to infer their choices are shaped by curated reality TV?
Re-wiring the feminine and maternal psyche is an ambitious project and the NWCI has drawn around itself a wider coalition of players who either share or have been persuaded to sign up to the objective. Collectively they are called ‘Together For Public’. They range from trade unions to organisations for the unemployed, migrants, travellers, students, single parent families and disadvantaged women. The list of about 40 also includes Saint Vincent de Paul (SVP) and an organisation for men called ‘Men’s Development Network’. Oddly enough the ICA, the organisation that once dedicated itself to all things domestic and maternal, is also included.
It’s all there online. A litany of NGOs and their offshoots, all heavily in receipt of taxpayers’ money. They have overlapping and interconnecting remits and most of us probably never heard of any of them. They have colourful names like Doras, Aoibhneas, Saoirse, S.P.A.R.K, Plé, MEND and Treoir. I am sure they will be soon joined by new entries, as the whole NGO sector has a very active replicating gene which is the clearest thing that can be said about it after its insatiable craving for taxpayers’ hard earned dosh.
According to thejournal.ie, citing ‘The Wheel’, an umbrella association for charities, one in eight of the Irish workforce currently is employed in the not for profit sector. Arguably, their main beneficiaries are those who run and administer them, not those whom they purport to serve. If you look at any NGO website you find they are led by a CEO who is supported typically by an array of managers, administrators and officers whose roles and biographies are described in corporate drivel and generic aspirational waffle. Behind them stand an unspecified number of foot soldiers. Finding causes and perpetuating causes is the only way such bodies can ensure their relevance and justify appeals for even more public funding.
NGOs are only as powerful as they are because the government allows them to be in order to advance the socio-economic model of western progressive liberalism. Billions of taxpayer largesse, predominantly and interestingly, the receipts of US tech and pharma companies, are invested in NGO jobs which promote – for them – desirable social objectives while energising the wider economy, allowing a substantial amount of the investment to find its way back to government coffers as taxation. It’s a sort of Ponzi scheme in circular rather than pyramid shape. Or an elaborate ever expanding game of fiscal musical chairs that will keep us circling with gleeful abandon until the music stops.
It’s easy to see how the state’s agenda aligns with NGOs like the NWCI when you consider the way they interplay in public life. Maximising the work force, optimising productivity both inside and outside the NGO sector, demands the efficiency of releasing women from what’s seen as the unproductive project of raising children. It’s what oils the economic wheels for both government and its greedy minions. Side by side they work to persuade, cajole, shame and eventually coerce women into abandoning uncool, backward and self-indulgent notions about motherhood.
If we are to socially engineer jobs how much better to do so in the construction sector? One of the main reasons so many social services are needed is because so many young people can’t even aspire to the security of owning their own homes. It’s a sad fact that the term ‘stay at home mother’ must have a hollow, mocking ring for many young mothers in temporary and insecure accommodation.
It’s all very sad to see our society becoming into a bloated, parasitic, uberstructure of self-referential, self-righteous and self-serving democratically unaccountable bodies as our citizens become more and more disempowered and beholden to the government who wants to control rather than serve them.