Madam, - If "maternal sensitivity" is the key to children's emotional security (Maureen Gaffney, Opinion & Analysis, September 17th), why was more childcare, rather than mothers' welfare, Dr Gaffney's focus in her recent address to the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party? Because such an argument would not be listened to? Possibly, because Fianna Fáil's interest in the issue seems confined, like Ibec's and Isme's, to how to get more mothers working in the plantations of the boom.
Granted, Dr Gaffney, as Chairwoman of the National Economic and Social Forum, is seeking the extension of maternity leave to one year. But if she thinks, as she wrote last week, that one parent should ideally be home part-time when a child is very young, why did she not put the case for a right to part-time or flexible working for parents, or at the very least, paid parental leave, given that one or other such provision is the norm right across Europe?
Mothers tend to be "sensitive", I would suggest, if they are valued and supported. Currently a mother in Ireland has a measly 18 weeks' maternity leave and no paid parental leave. If she stays out of work to rear her child, she accrues no State pension. In the eyes of the system, she might as well be dead.
Calls for more childcare are easily heard, because they are seen to serve the economic agenda. Calls for support for mothers are rarely heard, but if Dr Gaffney believes genuinely in "maternal sensitivity" she should make them now, loudly. - Yours, etc,
VICTORIA WHITE, Ashfield Road, Dublin 6.