I thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss some of my favourite articles — namely, Articles 41.2.1° and 41.2.2° — of my favourite Constitution. There was a time when I thought these articles involved an old-fashioned concept of women. However, in my need and in view of the needs of my son, Jamie, I found in them powerful protection of basic rights. I understand them better now and realise their importance. I only hope that I can explain and convince the committee, not only to retain them but also to use them to serve the common good, that is, the dignity of the person, social order and peace, which, as defined in the Constitution, is also the stated purpose of Government.
I will begin with Article 41.2.2°. The key to understanding this article is to see that it is not about mothers — or at least not primarily about them — but about children and their in-built developmental need for mothering.
The committee may recall a famous primate maternity study. The baby monkeys — males and females — were divided into three groups. Researchers observed them from birth through early adulthood. The first group were kept in bare cages and fed with a bottle of monkey milk. The second group had a bottle protruding from a round monkey-sized pillar surrounded with a soft fabric in the middle of the cage. The last group were raised with their mothers in the cage. Throughout the study, the difference between the mothered monkeys and the other two groups was striking. The two unmothered groups of monkeys were developmentally immature and dysfunctional, physically underdeveloped and sickly, though the presence of the fabric coloured structure, which the monkeys in the middle group used to hug and embrace and sleep snuggled up to, seemed to protect them from the worst of the damage. When these monkeys grew old enough and were bred, only the mothered monkeys parented appropriately. The others had severe parenting problems — some were even a danger to their young. Autopsies on the monkeys showed normal brain development in the mother-raised monkeys, a significant under-development in the middle group and brain damage in the monkeys in the bare cages.
Human studies can never be carried out in such a clear way. I do not even know if an animal study like that would be allowed today. However, it tells us something that is reflected in an enormous body of child development research literature. Maternity is necessary for the development of the child. What is a necessity of the human person is by definition an inalienable right. It is the protection of the child's right to receive necessary maternal input that this article seeks to offer. I put down a few of the international instruments. One of them points out that you have to be very careful of gender discrimination but it is not discrimination to talk about maternity. Maternity is a fact of life — men do not have babies. I will skip over the international instruments, which apply to both articles, not just the one I am talking about.
The primary right protected in the article is the child's, not the gender equality issue. To state the obvious, children come in two varieties — boys and girls. Both need mothers to develop. If we accept the child's need to be mothered, then we need to answer two questions. What is mothering and who mothers? If I could tell you exactly what mothering is I would be doing better than poets, philosophers, psychologists, etc. for many thousands of years. What I can tell you is that mothering has everything to do with nurturing, the foundations of identity, acceptance and presence.
Before birth the child is totally dependent on the mother. From her the child gets warmth, nourishment, sound and movement, even the space he or she occupies. At birth the baby needs the mother's colostrum to prime the immune system, her breasts to regulate antigens, her breathing rhythm to learn to remember to breath and the touch of her skin and her firm embrace to calm the baby's raw neurological system. The baby needs the familiar sound of her voice and heart to know that he or she is safe and her love to know the world is a welcoming place. For the weeks after birth the baby needs close maternal contact. For most of the history of the world in most cultures, young babies have even been carried on the mother's body and slept at her breast. In this early attachment stage they begin to study their mother from whom they have no concept of separate identity. The babies gradually begin to realise as they find a foot or hand which is not the mother's that they have an identity of their own. This process is made understandable and even bearable by the safe, constant, familiar and accepting presence of the mother. They need to know what and who the mother is to begin to find themselves in the difference between them. Even after the baby leaves the constant and frequent physical contact with the mother, the quality of the child's exploration is affected by the presence of his or her mother. In as far as the toddler feels he or she is in the mother's sphere, the child will be free to explore.
It took me several children to learn to put this to good use. My older children were terrors in church. They would run up and down the aisles and even on to the altar. I like a fool used to watch them and follow. It took me longer than it should have to learn that by watching them I was making them feel safe to leave the pew. When I followed them, they could run even further. It was as if I was letting out the invisible line which ties the mother and child. I changed my tack and focused on the Mass and the child stayed by me, usually touching me or even up in my arms. On the rare occasions when they did venture into the aisle they would try to get my attention, even making noise to make me look. As long as I did not, they came quietly back. Maternity provides a zone in which the child thrives and can explore.
As the child gets older he or she becomes less dependent on the mother for nutrition. All going well, much of the critical acceptance and basic identity work is complete. The child is moved on to the stage of identity formation and confirmation provided by paternity, by father and by those around them. Despite this, maternal presence remains the critical requirement for the child. As the child develops, he or she detaches from the need for the total physical contact of the newborn and pre-born and branches out in stages to a reliance on touching the mother, then later on seeing and hearing her, then on knowing she is close by and finally that they are just in her domain. This extension of the sense of maternal presence allows the child to expand his or her exploration. They begin a process of internalising maternity. In so far as he or she does this successfully, the child can sustain longer and longer periods away from the mother, which enables the child to go to places like school.
Though a child's requirement for what I call "on the spot" mothering typically diminishes, any child at any time can revert and need it again. How many of us have had children crawling into our beds at night? A six-year-old can suddenly look for his mother's lap, to be wrapped and to be rocked. A teenager can be scared and need to run to her mother, not unlike a three-year-old. This article guarantees the child that if he or she needs mothering and if the mother can and wants to be there to give it, money will not stand in the way.
Normally the nurturing aspect of maternity is for a limited time. Laying the basis of identity and communicating acceptance and a sense of the child's goodness are important maternal tasks which are done best when they are done early, but presence is lifelong. As the child grows the presence is less on the spot and more internalised, yet as a child there is no substitute for a mother just being there in whatever degree the child requires. Once in a while I am back from the parliament when my two youngest get home from school. They get a hug and they run off to play. They just disappear. I wind up sweeping floors and putting on a dinner and I wonder why I skipped lunch to get home early. Other days I arrive home at dinner time and they will ask, "How come you are so late?" even though when I am early they are just happy that I am there. Even when not actively speaking or interacting with them, the mother provides a presence, the maternity they must need after being in school all day. Anyone can give food. It is the child's early need for identity and acceptance and ongoing need for presence which is maternity. That is more than anything else protected by this article.
The second question relates to mothers. Ideally for the child his or her own mother mothers. If the child is to be adopted, we should make every effort to get the adoptive mother and baby together as early as possible. Many unavoidable factors can delay adoption but let us not allow red tape or funding to contribute to the delay. I know grandmothers and in one case an aunt who are the mothers, while the biological mother has taken the role of a big sister. There are many homes in which necessity or choice find a parent providing for the child alone, presumably a father cum mother, though this has not been my personal experience. I have found being a lone parent myself that I have had to do many of the things my husband did for and with the children. Although I think I am being mother and father to them, they consistently relate to me as mother. Most important in maternity is that there is one person with whom the child identifies as mother and that this person is committed to the role and to the child. This does not mean that there cannot be additional motherly figures in the child's life and mother substitutes — it is important for the child that there are — but the child needs for his or her development to live in the presence of someone who is mother for him or her.
To meet this need successfully, society must protect maternity. This is truer now than ever before as pressures, especially financial pressures, mount and as more women find themselves by choice or necessity in the workplace. This article is not about mothers being locked into domestic duty. The language of the article — "mother", "home" — expresses the concept of presence and foundational identity and acceptance and refers to the reality that most of this happens to the child within the family at home.
I have a friend who is a dedicated teacher in a disadvantaged area. During her years of teaching there have been a few children who wanted her to be mother. Invariably they had absent mothers through drug addiction. Although their need was great, she, being a very wise person, kept the relationship to a very warm teacher relationship. At the same time she went to great trouble to source them a mother from among their extended family. She knew that for her to mother, to create that relationship and then disappear in June, would be cruel. A mother needs to be somebody for the long haul, somebody attached to home. In a very real sense, the mother is home.
Of course, this article focused on the right of the child does involve and seek to protect the mother or the person doing the mothering. As such it guarantees that the motherer will be supported in the work of mothering the child and will be free from financial inhibition in responding to the child's needs, and in particular that the child's family can afford to respond and still pay for the necessities — rent, mortgage, food, heating. This article has implications for maternity leave, tax, children's, lone parent's and mothers' allowances, rates of social welfare benefits, etc., especially in the area of special needs where immediate mothering can be much more extended. It has implications for creating swinging doors on careers that make it easy for mothers to leave the workplace but easy to return. It is about having the freedom to take time from work when the child needs. It is about housing, etc.
What about the child's need for a father, to be fathered? This need is very real and very important. If it needs protection — I think it does — it needs to be added to this article or, better still, to be given an article of its own. Maybe we should have Article 42.2.3 protecting the right of the child to receive fathering. However, the emphasis in the article would be very different. Whereas for the child maternity is about presence and we talk about home because of that — not that we are trying to tie women to home — research consistently shows that the child's need for paternity is much more the developmentally important work of confirmation, connectedness, challenge, social identity. There is a different emphasis in fathering. In a sense the fatherer invites the child to take on the world, whereas the mother helps the child to be at home in it. An article guaranteeing the father's right to paternity, well worded, would have implications for access to children, social welfare, tax, work leave, house ownership, employment schedules, share of domestic work, opportunity, participation, decision-making, etc. and as such would have my welcome and support. Let us watch and listen to the children and their fathers, study the research and accumulated wisdom on paternity and see what we can put in place to support the child's need to be fathered.
I now turn to the other article dealing with women in the home and the common good. In the High Court I had a case in conjunction with Jamie's. I relied on this article not as a woman but as a carer. Mr. Justice Barr found that my constitutional right under this and other articles of the Constitution had not been vindicated. The State appealed this decision to the Supreme Court. Disappointingly, the six male judges did not really even examine the issues in the case and just dismissed them. The only judge who actually considered my case, reviewing the constitutional provisions invoked, was Mrs. Justice Susan Denham. In her judgment she clearly showed that the concept "woman within the home . . . gives the State the support without which the common good could not be achieved" in the context of the article clearly describes and values the person who cares for dependent persons, elderly, sick, disabled and children, within the home. She clearly implies that it is not gender specific, that this can equally apply to the carer who is a man. This has been further confirmed by the Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Murray, who has made it clear that the carer, though termed in the article a woman, can be a male carer. He stated, "It seems to me that the Constitution implicitly recognises similarly the value of a man's contribution in the home as a parent." This is already gender inclusive. Considering the incredibly unacceptable treatment of carers in our country, I would not recommend tampering with this clear, if ignored, affirmation of carers. I would not risk losing or weakening a constitutional acknowledgment of the fact that the common good cannot be achieved without the men and women who care for the weakest and most vulnerable in our society.
It should be noted that the Irish Constitution identifies the common good, i.e. the ensuring of the welfare and dignity of the person, establishment of true social order and peace between nations as the reason for its existence. The question we must ask is whether Article 42.2.1° is accurate. Is caring, particularly caring within the home, conducive to the welfare and dignity of the person? For me this is obvious. To have a home is a basic human need and to be able to choose to remain in it and receive focused personal care, specifically in our vulnerability, promotes the person. Caring is also conducive to the dignity of the person who is doing the caring. Supporting the carer and the recipient of care is conducive to the development of all of us as persons. Being a caring community is not just desirable, it is essential also to true social order. To be a caring community we must actively care, not just in words. Not everyone has the opportunity to care for someone in need of care but we can learn and be inspired by carers to bring caring into every sphere of our life — social, economic and personal.
Economically carers provide a service that is also immensely valuable. For the State to provide institutionalised care for all those who need care would be prohibitively expensive. The home carer provides good quality care at a fraction of the cost of State-funded institutional care services. Carers save the State enormous costs. In justice we need to recognise carers as the essential and valuable workforce they are. We urgently need to remunerate carers for our economic and social survival.
The European Commission has just released the Green Paper on the demography of Europe. Read it and then think about how we support and encourage the carers of our nation's children. In Europe we have a demographic pattern that is unique in the history of the world. This report states that we are in a downward demographic spiral that is already causing major social displacement and economic stagnation. It carries a clear warning: "Never in history has there been economic growth without population growth." We in Ireland are as yet buffered from this because of our larger families of the past and our protection of the unborn. We uniquely in western Europe have a dynamic, young and relatively large workforce for our size.
An older official in the Department of Finance commented to me recently that in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s they wondered how they were possibly going to feed, clothe and educate all those children. Little did they know, he said, that they would become the engine of Ireland's economic success. However, we must not be complacent. Our birth rate has steadily dropped. Though this drop is delayed, it is following the European trend in that it is now below replacement. It is quite simple. Many women will not have children or not have more than one or two just to drop them off from 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. in daycare. We need to make work family friendly so that parents can harmonise work and family life. We need to support those who choose to stay at home or to take a few years off to establish a family. If we become a society where people exist to serve employment rather than employment to serve people, then we are not going to have children to continue being employees. As this report warns, if we do not have children, we do not have a future. We do have the motivation even to work hard and sacrifice.
Article 42.2.1° demands that we also treasure not just the carers of children but also of other vulnerable groups. The Green Paper shows that we now have more elderly people to be cared for than ever before, with fewer people to do the caring. Add this to the fact that the number of people with a disability is increasing. Wisdom is that about 10% of the members of society will have a disability. We are at 17% in Europe and rising. There are increases in many debilitating chronic diseases like multiple sclerosis and disabling conditions like autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. More to be cared for, fewer to care — this does not work.
Recently I spoke about carers to a senior member of the European Commission at the Employment and Social Committee. I said that in Ireland carers are an endangered species. He said we should do what we can to care for carers, that in some European countries like Germany they are now extinct and this has led to enormous problems. I do not think the loss of carers stems from a lack of caring people but rather a lack of people who are available to care and who can afford to care. How do we deal with the crisis of care? As in the 12 Alcoholics Anonymous steps, we have first to admit that there is a problem.
Let us think of the cost of nursing home care. I know you are all very conscious of it at present because it is a topical issue. Multiply that by the number of carers we are losing every year and the number who are still soldiering on and we will get some idea of the potential cost of extinguishing home care by neglect. Before I became a member of the European Parliament I was a full-time carer of Jamie, who is profoundly disabled, and five other of the children who are still at home. Now that I am working it takes me more than my pay cheque to replace myself in terms of substitutes for the bare essentials of caring. What do we see in countries where family carers have dwindled or disappeared? We see institutionalisation of euthanasia, legal or not. I am not willing to stand by and watch this happen.
In the European Employment and Social Committee we give great care and attention to issues of health and safety in the workplace, length of working week, proper training, fair pay and so on. I consider it my responsibility to remind them and the visiting Commission and Council — I repeat it like a mantra — that no one knows or cares if the carer is lifting twice his weight or working 24 hours a day, seven days a week until they drop, or cares that they have to carry out complicated nursing procedures or deal with dangerous and challenging behaviours without training or support. For all this they are paid nothing. This is what that article is about.
I wish to comment on Article 41.1.1° in relation to the family. The family is the natural habitat of the person. If we want to save the panda or the orang-utan and help them to flourish, we need to protect and preserve their natural habitat. If we want to help the human person to flourish, we must protect and prioritise the family.