‘McEntee entitled to maternity leave despite headache it’s now causing’
FORMER justice minister Nora Owen has said she does not believe the public would welcome the appointment of a new minister to replace Helen McEntee when she has her baby.
The former Fine Gael politician said she admired Ms McEntee, adding the Justice Minister would face criticism from the public for taking leave, despite being entitled to take time to care for her child.
Ms Owen added Ms McEntee’s upcoming absence would be “giving somebody, somewhere, a lot of headaches”.
She was commenting on the issue revealed in the Irish Independent on Saturday. It was “extraordinary” that it appeared a constitutional amendment was needed to ensure public representatives, including Ms McEntee, were permitted to take maternity leave, she said.
Ms McEntee will become the first Cabinet minister to give birth while in office. The baby is due in May and she intends taking six months off. At present, public office holders must take sick leave to get time off to have look after their newborn baby.
Ms Owen was justice minister between 1994 and 1997.
“It does raise the whole issue of what happens when somebody like Helen says she’s going to take her full six months,” she said. “She will have to be paid because she’s entitled to be paid. But do you put another person in and is there another full ministerial salary paid out?
“Do you raise the profile of a junior minister and put them into a senior ministry? Do they get the extra money because they are on less pay?
“And then do you appointment a temporary junior minister?
“I don’t think the public would be thankful for kind of a full new minister to be appointed on the full salary at a time when people are really struggling. I’d imagine that is an area that is giving somebody, somewhere, a lot of headaches.
“I admire [Ms McEntee] because she will get criticism.
“Someone will say: ‘Oh, she’s getting her salary, she should be in there.’ She will get her salary the same as anybody else on leave when they’re out.”
Mrs Owen said it was a “pity” a referendum may be needed before women TDs, senators and councillors were given maternity rights, and that it worried her that more women are not entering political life.
She admitted she had been targeted for being a woman during her two-decade career in the Dáil and described the online abuse of female politicians as “disgraceful”, and that it “shouldn’t be happening”.
“Very often, depending on what ministry you have, as a woman there can be an element of targeting,” she added.
“I remember one journalist. He’s dead now, so I’m not maligning him.
“It was a particularly difficult time and there was a lot of crime and drugs were growing.
“He wrote an article saying: ‘We probably wouldn’t be going through this now if Michael Noonan had been made minister for justice as opposed to Nora Owen.’
“A man, in other words.
“When someone used to raise it with me I used to joke and say: ‘Oh yeah, the criminals are all sitting around saying, ‘Come on, lads, let’s do the crime now because there’s a woman in there and we won’t get caught.’
“It was such a stupid thing to say and to be honest, a very misogynistic thing to say because crime is crime.
“Up until Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, every minister of justice before that was a man. And our prisons didn’t empty. Our crime didn’t stop.
“That kind of thing really angered me but you learn how to cope with it.”
Nora Owen features in Proud to Serve: The Voices of the Women of Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine
Gael 1922-1992. Fine Gael is marking International Women’s Day by launching a reprint of the book by Maria Hegarty and Martina Murray. A great-niece of Michael Collins, Ms Owen was elected to Dáil Éireann in 1981