While recognising that there are some 20,000 lone fathers - as well as families where the wife has paid work and the husband looks after the children - most childcare problems involve a personal dilemma for mothers of young children, writes Garret FitzGerald
In this article I shall focus on this overwhelmingly female aspect of the childcare problem, and on the State's responsibilities in relation to it.
Childcare is now becoming a major political issue, and will play a role in the run-up to the next general election.
This reflects the fact that since 1991 the number of married and cohabiting women who work has risen by 80 per cent to over 350,000. In addition, there are now over 150,000 lone parents, of whom more than 60,000 work.
More than half of these 400,000-plus working women have children of pre-school or primary school age.
When a survey was carried out 2½ years ago it emerged that about half of those 220,000 women managed to work while also caring for their young children. Many, of course, were part-time workers. However the remaining 115,000 had to make other arrangements for childcare.
Almost 60,000 of these had their children looked after by relatives (three-quarters of whom - many of them no doubt grandparents - received no payment for their assistance), whilst 40,000 parents employed carers. Only 15,000 using creches or Montessori schools.
Since the time of that survey in late 2002 the scale of the childcare problem has increased.
These data show that one-third of working mothers of children have to pay, in one way or another, for childcare, and no doubt others would do so were they able to afford it. What can, or should, the State do about this matter?
First of all, it is important to be clear that several factors impel women with young children to undertake paid work.
For many, the motivation is to escape poverty. Some of these are women whose partner may be unable to find work or be incapable of work perhaps due to disability. Some are lone parents.
A second category are women who, although not poor, together with their partners find it difficult to manage financially. This could be due to mortgage repayments or rent arising from high house prices.
A third category are women who are not under financial pressure but who do not wish to abandon their careers when their children are still young, or who feel a need to develop their own talents outside the home.
The State has a duty to make provision for parental leave for a period after the birth of a child.
It is obviously in the interest of society that parents be facilitated in bonding with their children during that period, and there is a striking contrast between our niggardliness in this regard and the situation in some Scandinavian countries, where some governments provide for up to two years' leave for each parent.
But society's and, therefore, the State's interest in this matter is not confined to making provision for parental leave.
More generally, it has a long-term interest in helping parents to care for their children at home after the initial period following the birth of a child.
It also has a huge demographic interest in maintaining our birthrate, upon which will depend the future support of those now at work who will in time constitute a very large body of pensioners.
It needs to be said that the State has different responsibilities in respect of women in different circumstances.
For women seeking to escape poverty, it has a clear social duty to assist them. This can be done best by providing childcare facilities free or at very low cost.
And as part of its general role to help ease the housing problem, it could be argued that the State should offer some help to families under financial pressure from high mortgage or rent costs.
Given the many pressing social demands on its resources, it is less clear that the State has a similar duty to intervene in the choice many women who are free from such financial pressures have to make, between remaining at home while their children are young or continuing a career which they find fulfilling.
In the past the State intervened in a most drastic way when married women engaged in paid work by dismissing its own employees as soon as they got married.
Today we reject such high-handed social engineering. But reversing this process by distorting the tax system in favour of married women who engage in paid work at the expense of women who choose to remain at home - in most cases to care for their children - seems to me an equally objectionable form of State intervention.
I have to say that I find unconvincing the argument that what is believed to be a need for more workers to maximise economic growth must take precedence over the at least equal and balancing interest of the State in parents caring for their children at home where possible.
As I suggested in this column last week, we should instead be trying to optimise rather than maximise economic growth.
From these considerations I deduce that the State's role in this matter should be twofold.
First, to provide childcare facilities free or at low cost for the benefit of these who need to escape poverty or who face extreme financial pressures because of housing costs.
And, second, by increasing the financial assistance given in child benefit to parents so women can make a free choice between caring for their children in the home and paid employment outside the home.
The key point here is that any assistance given should be designed not to influence the mother's decision in one direction or another, but rather to help her to choose freely what course to follow.
It would be particularly important that any help given should either consist of childcare arrangements concentrated on those in greatest need or provided by way of direct payments.
Tax reliefs for individuals should at all costs be avoided for they are perverse in their impact, helping only those well enough off to be in the tax net, and helping most of all those with higher incomes.