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DUBLIN — Maternity leave isn’t an unusual ask for Western Europe in the 21st century. But in Ireland, the Cabinet’s first pregnancy has posed a potential constitutional crisis.
After months of behind-the-scenes legal argument and political haggling, Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced Thursday that his government’s justice minister, Helen McEntee, can take six months’ paid maternity leave without having to quit the Cabinet as had been feared. McEntee is Ireland’s first Cabinet minister ever to become pregnant while in office.
Martin said Irish law — constrained by a 1937 constitution that enshrines a woman’s place in the home, not at work — desperately needs an update.
“The current legal framework … is based on completely outdated assumptions and attitudes,” Martin told the socially-distanced parliament as a masked McEntee sat nearby in the Dublin Convention Centre.
While other public servants have statutory rights to six months’ paid maternity leave, no such law exists for elected politicians.
The constitution — drafted by the founding father of Martin’s own Fianna Fáil party, Éamon de Valera, in cooperation with Catholic Church leaders — requires politicians to be available for votes at any time and makes no concessions for pregnancy.
Ireland has undergone a social revolution since the 1970s, when national law was closely aligned with Catholic doctrine and female public servants, such as teachers, were required to quit their jobs once they married.
When asked to modernize the constitution, Irish voters have increasingly said “yes” since narrowly legalizing divorce in 1995. They overwhelmingly backed same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion three years later.
Yet Ireland’s bedrock legal document still stipulates in its 41st Article: “The State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. … Mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
The previous government had plans to amend that section via a referendum, then to pass legislation creating parental leave rights for lawmakers. It failed to organize either step in time.
Martin said the legal struggle to provide a maternity arrangement for his justice minister shows “the absolute requirement for permanent reform to ensure full equality for all public representatives.”
“We want to make sure that having a family is in no way in conflict with pursuing a career in public life,” he said.
Martin spoke to a 160-member chamber that has only 36 female lawmakers, poor by Western European standards. Women’s representation would be even lower without Ireland’s 2012 introduction of a requirement for parties to field at least 30 percent female candidates in elections or lose half of their state funding; that threshold is to rise to 40 percent in 2023.
Ireland since 1990 has elected two women, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, to serve as president, the ceremonial head of state. It has never had a female prime minister.
“Women’s participation in politics is made very difficult by the structures and the system and they absolutely have to be changed,” said Bríd Smith, an opposition socialist lawmaker.
Martin’s government was confronted with the unresolved issue when McEntee announced her pregnancy in December with a due date in May.
After lengthy consultations with the attorney general, Martin announced Thursday that McEntee would temporarily lose her justice portfolio on April 1 but retain her Cabinet seat during a six-month paid maternity leave.
Reflecting gender and political priorities in Ireland’s three-party government, McEntee’s workload will be transferred to two other women already at the Cabinet table. Both are from McEntee’s party, Fine Gael.
Heather Humphreys, who already oversees two government departments, will be expected to triple-job as justice minister. Junior transport minister Hildegarde Naughton will double up as a junior justice minister.
McEntee thanked her Cabinet colleagues “for their help and cooperation in accommodating me.” She said the law must be overhauled for the next generation.
“Just as many young girls as young boys want to succeed in politics,” she said. “Those of us in politics now have a responsibility to make it easier for today’s girls to fulfil those dreams and ambitions.”
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