Supreme Court shows why we do not need the referendum on family
AMONG the many passengers stranded in Dublin due to last weekend’s storms was a friend of mine, whose flight was cancelled as she tried to get back to her job and her family in Manchester on Sunday night.
She’d been here, as she is every second weekend, to care for her elderly parents, taking turns with other siblings to look after the couple who require 24hour assistance.
The most the HSE will offer them is three-and-a-half hours’ care a day – that’s between them, by the way, not three-and-a-half hours each for two old and infirm people who both worked and paid taxes all their lives.
And on top of this bounty, to a hardworking couple now in need of care, the HSE provides precisely two incontinence pads each a day.
If they need any more, then, just like with the 24-hour care they require, their family has to pay up. Two incontinence pads a day.
It also emerged this week that one in four 17-year-olds is caring regularly for a relative. They’re mostly looking after younger siblings or grandparents, and more than half are minding multiple relatives. And those young people, taking on adult-sized responsibilities while their friends are enjoying their teens or studying for their exams, get poorer Leaving Cert results and are less likely to go on to higher education.
So their educational opportunities, their career prospects and their futures are impacted by the weight of their duties in the home.
Welcome to the world of family carers in 21st-century Ireland. This is what our Government is so proud of that they want you to vote ‘yes’ in a referendum to set this shameful system in stone.
Because let’s be entirely clear on one thing – this virtue-signalling, gesturepolitics referendum on the so-called ‘care amendment’ will not make one whit of difference to any carer’s life.
It does nothing more than pay patronising lip service to the people, young and old, left struggling to care for loved ones by a Government that makes them feel like supplicants when they apply for the most meagre support, and measures out their worth in incontinence pads – two a day.
Instead of enshrining any rights for those people caring for relatives, it simply pats them on the back for the work they do, ‘without which the common good could not be achieved’, and ‘shall strive’ to support them.
No promises, in other words, but they’ll do their best.
If you are happy with that rock-bottom level of commitment to the tens of thousands of people, including schoolchildren, looking after relatives without respite or support on a daily basis, then, by all means, vote ‘yes’.
In a nutshell, this amendment will just copper-fasten the cynical status quo: why should the Government bother funding the care of elderly or disabled people when they can leverage the love of relatives, and with a constitutional imprimatur if they get this one past you, to do the job for buttons?
Since 2001, this State has spent €133million on 15 constitutional referenda, meaning the two forthcoming campaigns will cost upwards of €18million.
That would buy a lot of care hours and incontinence pads, but wouldn’t tick nearly as many woke boxes on this Government’s halo-polishing agenda.
Previous referenda have addressed constitutional provisions that required amending to keep pace with social change – divorce, same-sex marriage, abortion – but these latest stunts were demanded by nobody, have caused no social injustice and will change precisely nothing. Recently, Minister Simon Harris made the extraordinary claim that the Constitution currently says that single-parent households are not families, apparently unaware that (a) it does not and (b) there’s been no legal distinctio n between the children of married and unmarried parents in this country for decades. Senator and heavyweight constitutional lawyer Michael McDowell, who is calling for a ‘no’ vote, sensibly dismissed Minister Harris’s contribution as ‘ill-considered, incorrect and irrelevant’.
And, embarrassingly for the Government, just this week, the Supreme Court proved just how irrelevant these amendments, as well as their advocates, really are.
Without any need of a referendum, it found that an unmarried father caring for his three children after his partner’s death had a constitutional entitlement to the widower’s pension, as he was as much a parent as any married dad.
So much for Mr Harris’s claim that the Constitution doesn’t recognise single-parent families, eh?
The highest court in the land can clearly be trusted to interpret the Constitution as a living document, and to apply the language of 1937, however outdated, to the social realities of 2024.
Whether this Government can be trusted to interpret a shopping list, let alone understand the implications of the changes it is urging and the meanings of crucial words – like ‘woman’ – that it can’t even define, is another day’s work.