Sir, - The most telling feature of the response to the report of the Expert Working Group on Childcare has been the complete absence of attention to the implications for fatherhood and men and childcare more generally.
Your Editorial of February 8th rightly challenges the agenda of interest groups such as IBEC for framing childcare solely in terms of the needs of industry motivated by the need to keep mothers in the workforce and attract back those who left to rear their children. The real issue, you suggest, is "what do parents want? Do they want to spend as much time as possible at work or what balance between the two do they wish to strike?" Too true, but posing the matter in such gender-neutral terms merely colludes with avoidance of the critical issue of what men as well as women are prepared to do to become more active parents. The entire childcare debate exposes the assumption that parenting is synonymous with mothering. Quite what role fathers have to play is not even mentioned, let alone identified as an area for policy development. Garret FitzGerald (Opinion, February 6th) epitomises this in managing to write an entire article on the matter which mentions the word "father" precisely once. What we were offered was yet another mind-numbingly rational analysis of the economics of childcare.
As Senator Kathleen O'Meara wisely shows (Opinion, February 4th), access to work and childcare provision are inseparable from tacking child poverty, something that simply must be at the heart of any just social policy. But even though she writes with a certain amount of personal honesty as a "working parent", she too falls into the trap of saying absolutely nothing about the "other" parent - fathers - and what all these must mean for them/us.
If this wasn't bad enough, Patricia Casey (Opinion, February 4th) caps it all by attempting to obliterate the one worthwhile proposal in the report that does explicitly focus on men: that 20 per cent of childcare workers should be male. She asks "What is the basis for this ideological statement, and could it be that we will see quotas and gender-balancing in respect of childcare?" This implies that her own statements are somehow non-ideological and presumably reflect value-free `truths' (which, surprise, surprise, just happen to support the staus-quo and regard parenting as mother's business). Rarely have I seen a more ideologically inspired writer on the pages of The Irish Times, and one who so scandalously tries to close off the proposal to get more men involved in childcare by rejecting it on the pathetic grounds that it is "politically correct", as if that explained something, which it doesn't.
This all serves to show how the entire debate is contaminated by the worst kind of patriarchial values and that nothing short of a complete reframing of the issue is required. Men and male-dominated institutions urgently need to reflect publicly on what they want their relationship to children to be, as men and as fathers. As Steve Biddulph has wisely written: "Eventually in our work, we have to ask the big, `So what?' The sales figures, the promotion - what do they mean? When we explain to our teenage kids why we have missed their school play, we need to have a good answer. As we sit in the Whispering Gums Retirement Home, waiting for the comfort of a cool bedpan, the question will come up, `What was my life worth?' " - Yours etc, Harry Ferguson,
Department of Applied Social Studies, University College, Cork.