I wish to say "Hello" to Dr. Barry, Dr. Murphy and the committee and to give my good wishes to Deputy Bacik.
I wish to focus on the imbalance in the provision of childcare and elder care, particularly in State, society and market provision. As a starting point for understanding how we as humanity meet our social needs generally, let us think of three mechanisms: distribution in the marketplace; redistribution through the state; and the reciprocal interdependence in human relationships that Dr. Barry spoke about. Our fundamental issue in Ireland is that we have a totally imbalanced care system where the market is delivering up to 70% of childcare and 85% of elder care. The problem is not so much the model of the private actor delivering care, but the placing of the profit-making motive at the centre of care provision. We tend to commodify care and focus on its exchange value and what profit we can get from it as an activity. This shifts care towards a market ethic, which has fundamental impacts on how we understand care and relate to one another as potential receivers and givers of care. This is the issue that I wish to address.
Focusing overly on the market for delivery tends to amplify the structural inequalities that exist in care burdens and care penalties, particularly in the context of the Irish political economy, which has one of the highest levels of low wages in the OECD. The sense that gender inequality is focused in the low-wage care sector is amplified by the structure of that sector.
I am arguing for a better balance, which can be summed up in the idea of a shift to a "careful" State, that is, a State that places care much more at the centre of how it understands how its society and economy need to operate. Such care would be universal and valued and a care ethic would underpin it. It would seek gender equality and gender neutrality and recognise reciprocity. We can use two policy tools to develop this approach to care, namely, universal basic services and participation income.
Before discussing these, I will define "care". The word itself is deeply problematic in the range of activities it has to cover. There are 40 shades of green and the Inuit have 50 words for "snow", but we only have one word for describing all care and social reproductive activity. These stretch across many sectors - health, the care we are discussing today, education and even nature if we want to broaden it out to the essential front-line activity that keeps us alive. There are many ways of defining "care", but I will focus on a narrow definition of it that has to do with child, social, adult and elder care that is provided directly.
Dr. Barry spoke, and I am sure Dr. Murphy will as well, about the negative consequences of the current model. Its fundamental logic is not care, but profit. Paradoxically, the model of economic activity does not recognise the reciprocal interdependence at the heart of our relationships even though we are dependent on those reciprocal interdependent relations. Women in that context are seen as an infinite elastic resource of care provision, as we saw during the pandemic. I do not need to draw graphic illustrations of this.
We are arguing that we should try to rebalance away from the market towards State and society, although I am not romantic about the State or society. We need only look at our recent history to know that both let women and children down badly, and are still doing so in many respects. I am not arguing for a romantic vision of the State at the centre of care or of turning to society. Rather, I am arguing for a balance and recognition of the fact that there is considerable diversity in State provision, private provision and forms of social provision.
The "careful" State would value and practise care as a right that everyone gives and receives across his or her life cycle. In this sense, there would be gender equality because there would be a more equal distribution of care giving and receiving. There would be a balance across market, State and society. There would be two key tools. A universal basic service would see the State taking a proactive role in regulating care for a wider variety of care providers, including different models of ownership than we have at present. The State would legislate to provide a much richer range of ways to approach care giving, recognising different forms of social economy and non-profit private sector delivery.
There are a lot of good examples of where they have done this in other countries. The State would have a much more expansive regulatory role than it does at the moment. Its role in regulation is usefully focused on compliance at present and that is because of the serious issues we have had in quality of care. With Big Start it has moved into a more fundamental role of regulating for wages and for funding the wages of care workers, which is welcome. However, I would see that the role of the State as the regulator needs to be imagined far beyond what it is at present, particularly to regulate the shape and structure of the care sector to be much more creative and innovative than it is now because the different models of company law and the variety of options that care givers have are limited when you look at it. The State also has roles as planner, monitor and funder in this model. All of those roles need to be expanded in the Irish context. Big Start is a good example of how to start that and the role can be developed and expanded to get better balance and to ratchet down the role of for-profit private delivery in the care infrastructure. Norway provides a positive and practical example of what universal basic services, UBS, would look like. Norway: maintains a strong regulatory role in quality; funds 85% of childcare costs; caps fees for affordability; has good regulatory governance; limits profit; and requires a governance process where all actors have to collaborate in and co-organise care. There are good practical examples where the Irish State could take a lead.
The second prong is participation income, which goes back to reciprocity and interdependence. We must find a tool in the welfare system that enables us to value and support care participation in the home, the community and social relations. That is recognising that care should never be totally private or public. There is always a huge demand for care to be rooted in our reciprocal social relations because that is what we do. We must also be respectful of our diverse family forms in how we manage care. An income support that values and recognises that care is needed and I am arguing that it could be framed as a participation income that would be available to people who are doing a wide range of socially valued activity that is broadly enabling care and social reproduction in our society. That would complement a universal basic service, UBS, because not everybody would want to be or should be in one of those services.
A participation income could demarketise and decommodify care, taking it away from being a market value. It could also free up people’s time to enable them to engage more voluntarily in the caring roles that a lot of us want to do. Many of us want to care more but we simply do not have time, money, resources or enablement to do so. There is a way of approaching income support that could build on care provision. Ironically, because the Irish welfare state is so categorical and because it still has so many different types of welfare payment, it has payments that recognise care. The seeds of what I am talking about are well embedded in the Irish welfare state and in some of our old approaches to labour market programmes. We are not starting from scratch in any of this; there are tools in place that we can build on and these ideas have been discussed in the 2006 report on supporting lone parents, in the recent climate justice report by the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, and in the climate action plan. Therefore it is not as far-fetched or romanticised as it might sound as an idea.
We can focus on how to help women as a feminised concept or we can have a feminist approach to the debate, which seeks to put gender equality at the centre of it. It is important to frame care outside of those marketised rationales and to begin to get the language of ethics of care, public services and income support outside of the male breadwinner model we currently have. Defining care as an essential public service is part of that but we must also recognise that reciprocity and interdependence at the heart of our relationships. The Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality did a lot to begin to frame care in that direction and demonstrated demand for that State-led care in Ireland. It made recommendations for investing 1% of GNP and for higher taxes or a care tax to make a reality of the recommendations. It also recommended a constitutional reframing of how we understand and value care.
We have done a lot in this and it is welcome that the committee is focusing on trying to put together the compass towards a policy mapping that would get us from A to B. I would hope the committee would take its work in that direction.
