Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality

On January 16, the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality met online to discuss the topic of care – more specifically, the social responsibility of care and women and men’s co-responsibility for care within the family. Dr Catherine Day, Chairperson of the Assembly, remarked that the current Covid crisis has brought these issues even more to the forefront and reinforced the importance of public debate in this area.

The Assembly was established by a resolution of the Oireachtas in 2019 and is made up of 100 citizens who have been randomly selected from across Ireland and are broadly representative of Irish society.

At the meeting, members received video presentations from experts to assist on their deliberations. Teresa Heeney, CEO of Early Childhood Ireland, was invited to present on our recently published report “Pathways to Better Prospects: Delivering Proper Terms and Conditions for the Early Years Workforce in Ireland”. Teresa highlighted the precarity of terms and conditions of employment among ELC/SAC workers in Ireland and advocated for radical transformation. This includes the implementation of a fully publicly-funded system, which would bring Ireland closer to the Nordic model while respecting Ireland’s history and established institutions.

Dr Ursula Barry from University College Dublin and Professor Nóirín Hayes from Trinity College Dublin also presented. Overall, some of the main suggestions made by both experts and submissions received during a prior public consultation process were the following (the full list can be accessed here):

• Develop plans to provide care as a public service, funded by the state, that entitles children to a childcare place available to all children. Ensure that costs to parents are based on ability to pay;
• Increase state investment in childcare in the long term to 1% of GDP (as recommended by UNICEF). In the shorter term, proposals include increasing funding to 0.6% of GDP and increasing ECEC funding to 0.5% of GDP;
• Improve the pay of (often low-paid) care workers like nurses, social workers and childcare workers;
• Develop and implement a career structure for care workers;
• Increased care and support infrastructure to address systemic issues that exclude people with disabilities from society;
• Facilitate combining care and paid employment through, for example, increased parental leave and standardised flexible working policies for parents;
• Develop a campaign to raise awareness of issues affecting carers.

Members gave feedback from breakout discussion groups, and they were generally very supportive of the measures above. A final report containing all recommendations from the Assembly will soon be prepared for the Oireachtas, which is required to officially respond to it.

The proceedings of the meetings, with links to all presentations, briefing materials and discussion sessions can be found here.