Title: ‘The Visible yet Invisible Lone Mother in Irish Society, a Critical Commentary’
This commentary will provide a critical review of Irish legislative and policy responses to
lone mothers from 1970 to the current day. The background to this review are the
profound changes, which has occurred in Ireland over the past four decades, which have
fundamentally altered the context within in which women mother and have increased their
choices in this regard. Traditional structures of gender inequality have been challenged and
women have acquired a range of rights, in relation to fertility control, labour market access
and pay, welfare provision, property rights, divorce, etc. These developments result in an
increasingly varied range, of socially and culturally sanctioned options, from which women
can choose how to organise their personal and working lives. Demographic information
indicates that women are experiencing motherhood, in a variety of legal, domestic and
relational contexts. For instance, the non-marital birth rate in Ireland has risen from 2.7% in
1970 to 33.7% in 2011 (Connolly, 2015: 28).
This commentary will focus specifically on social protection for lone parent families, while
also considering the general statutory infrastructure of childcare and family leave
entitlements with particular reference to the experiences of women as lone mothers. The
review will be informed by feminist social policy and feminist scholarship on motherhood. It
will be demonstrated how particular conceptualisations of motherhood have resulted in
policies which continue to privatise the burdens of childcare and fail to explore the potential
for fathers and the wider community to assume greater responsibility for the care and
nurturance of children (Leane, 2008). An approach to law and policy making, which moves
beyond the narrow lens of the work/home binary and the logic of contemporary capitalism,
will be advocated (Stephens, 2004; Lister, 2002). Furthermore it will be argued that for the
purpose of law and policy making, consideration should be given to shifting the
conceptualization of mothering away from identity and towards activity (Maher, 2004 &
2005). This is for two key reasons; it challenges understandings of childcare as the private
responsibility of individual women and it deconstructs essentialising and moralising binaries
between different types of mothers (i.e. partnered mothers/lone mothers, mothers in the
formal labour market /mothers who work and care at home etc,) which work to sustain
their differential governance and regulation.