Holly Cairns is having a baby with her partner, for which they are both to be roundly congratulated. Holly Cairns also believes, as she said this week, that there should be specific maternity leave policies in place for sitting TDs and other politicians. On that, she should be roundly opposed, for several reasons.
The first and most obvious reason is that politics is vastly different from other jobs in that the term of the job is fixed, and is not in any way tied to doing any work at all. Sinn Fein MPs in Westminster, for example, abstain from parliament entirely because they do not wish to take the oath of allegiance to Charles III, and further object to the idea that Westminster should be sovereign over Northern Ireland. They are paid their full salaries anyway, despite not fulfilling one of the major duties of a parliamentarian – to represent their constituents in parliamentary debates.
Their voters, it should be said, are just fine with this. That is the position they adopt before the election, and they get elected in any case.
My point, however, is that the same applies to the Oireachtas: A TD is elected by their constituents, and is not actually obliged, legally, to do any work at all. A TD who did not show up for work once in five years would nevertheless receive full pay and pension entitlements, foregoing only any attendance allowances – a form of expenses – that they might otherwise be paid. The only real incentives to show up to work for a TD or a Senator are first that by not doing so, they might jeopardise their chances of re-election, and second that perhaps they really want to attend and vote and take part in the running of the country.
There is no other job like this: A teacher or a nurse or a lawyer takes maternity leave because there are no other circumstances where she could simply take months off work without consequence and keep her full salary. A politician can do it at any time.
What Cairns is really worried about, one might suspect, are the consequences of taking time off work for maternity, which will naturally include a lack of public visibility for her in the Oireachtas or on television, and a reduction in the constituency services she provides to the people who elected her, while she’s away from her job. The problem is that maternity leave wouldn’t solve either of these problems.
Nevertheless, even if maternity leave would solve them, the options in terms of providing it are deeply unsatisfactory.
When somebody in a “normal” job takes maternity leave, it is customary for their employer to hire in a temporary replacement – this is how many teachers, for example, start their careers, by doing maternity cover.
The problem is that you cannot draft in a replacement politician. The basic principle of our democratic state is that our public representatives are elected. The idea that we could simply “draft” in a temporary TD to cast votes on legislation or Dáil motions is deeply undemocratic, since that person would have no mandate from the voters and may well arrive at different conclusions on legislation to Ms. Cairns. A law passed with the deciding vote cast by such a legislator would, undoubtedly, face constitutional challenge.
In terms of constituent services, TDs are already provided with an allowance for staff to support them with this work. In the vast majority of cases, those staff are the ones who do almost all that work for a TD anyway – writing letters to civil servants, passport officers, medical card deciders, and pothole fillers on behalf of their boss’s constituents. The purpose of providing these staff, in essence, is to ensure that a TD can provide a good constituency service all year around, even when they are overseas or on holiday. Or perhaps taking time away from work to have a child.
One can understand Deputy Cairns’ frustration up to a point: Because there is no officially recognised maternity leave, she probably feels as if she might be punished by the voters for taking time off to spend with her newborn and family. Yet this is an occupational hazard of her chosen career that, many voters might think, is well offset by the guaranteed salary and generous pension and severance payments. Further, one might think that persuading voters that being tolerant to a politician who has just had a baby is essentially a political task: Politics is entirely about persuasion. In this case, one might think most voters have already been persuaded that young mothers should be given a break.
On the substance of maternity leave, though, it should be noted that Ms. Cairns is a legislator who is, for the moment, still at work. Her job is to draft and design the country’s laws. One might think that if she believes politicians should be entitled to maternity leave, then the least she might do would be to come up with a workable proposal that could be drafted into legislation. As yet, she has not done so – most likely, I suspect, for the reasons raised above.
Ultimately, it is up to the voters of her Cork South West constituency whether Ms Cairns retains her job at the coming election. Part of the decision they will make will be whether to take into account that she will need to take time off work to care for her newborn, and whether to withhold from or indeed grant her their votes on that basis. I suspect that they will – generously – not consider it a factor either way, and nor should they. But the idea that there should be some formalised structure to grant her formal leave is bizarre for another reason: The election campaign seems at least reasonably likely to fall during the period that she would be off work. It must be held, remember, in the next nine or so months.
How does maternity leave work in a General Election campaign? Perhaps RTE might allow a substitute for Ms Cairns in the leaders’ debate (a cynic might suggest this was no bad thing for the Soc Dems). Perhaps her party can and will manage without her. But can she really expect to be re-elected in her own seat without canvassing, or meeting voters? I doubt it.
There is no structure for maternity leave that can take a situation like this into account. Nor could one be designed without fundamentally altering the nature of democracy itself. That’s all very unfortunate for Ms. Cairns, but it’s also just one oddity in the otherwise relatively rewarding career she has chosen for herself.