Smith, Olivia --- "Reconciling Care-giving and Work in Ireland: The Contribution of Protection Against Family Status Discrimination" [2011] ELECD 870; in Busby, Nicole; James, Grace (eds), "Families, Care-giving and Paid Work" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Families, Care-giving and Paid Work

Editor(s): Busby, Nicole; James, Grace

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802628

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Reconciling Care-giving and Work in Ireland: The Contribution of Protection Against Family Status Discrimination

Author(s): Smith, Olivia

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

9. Reconciling care-giving and work in
Ireland: the contribution of
protection against family
status discrimination
Olivia Smith

INTRODUCTION
Over the last decade a range of legal and public policy measures have been
introduced in Ireland in response to the need to provide greater support for
both dependent members of Irish society and those who combine care-
taking work with labour market participation. Yet during the era of the
Celtic-Tiger economic boom, which saw Ireland ranked as the fourth-
richest economy in the world,1 investment in measures to support individu-
als in reconciling labour market work with care-giving work remained one
of the lowest across European states (OECD 2003).2 Ireland's historical
non-interventionist approach to care work reflects the traditional division
between the public and the private in western liberal capitalist democracies,
and the confinement of care-taking responsibilities to the latter realm.
This partial privatization of dependency has a considerable impact on
the goal of gender equality. The division of labour within the private sphere
remains gendered with the `moral imperative to care' still largely falling on
women (Lynch 2007: 560). Indeed, given the gendered division in unpaid
and paid labour enshrined in the Irish Constitution and successive Irish
employment and social welfare policies, it remains somewhat remarkable
that Irish women have managed to enter the labour force in the numbers
that they have as evidenced from the considerable upsurge in female labour
force participation rates from the early 1990s.3 The state has ...