A woman's place

I swear this will be the last post to come from last week's Leviathan. Towards the end of the evening, Article 41 came in for a bit of flak. This is the infamous bit that talks about the woman's place in the home.

41.2.1 In particular, 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.
41.2.2 The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home

Unfortunately, the position from the panel was to make this clause gender neutral rather than dispense with it entirely. Were we to do so, we would be constitutionally protecting the right to rely on social welfare and never leave the house for all citizens. The system would last about one week in those circumstances.

In a way it would be a shame to see 41.2 be dumped from the Constitution. For the time in which it was written it was a very progressive sub-clause. By recognizing that there was value, both socially and economically, to the work that women were doing in the home, the feminist movement in Ireland took a big step forward. However, now it is completely out of date and should be junked. After all, the individualisation of tax credits by McCreevy a few years back should have been challenged on the basis of this clause and yet wasn't. So if we're actually ignoring sections of the Constitution then why have them at all.

Kildare Street Confidential

Last night at Leviathan one of the contributors (Gerard Hogan I think) mentioned that cabinet confidentiality had a couple of exceptions written into the Constitution. 28.4.3 is the relevant article and reads as follows

The confidentiality of discussions at meetings of the Government shall be respected in all circumstances save only where the High Court determines that disclosure should be made in respect of a particular matter

• in the interests of the administration of justice by a Court, or
  
• by virtue of an overriding public interest, pursuant to an application in that behalf by a tribunal appointed by the Government or a Minister of the Government on the authority of the Houses of the Oireachtas to inquire into a matter stated by them to be of public importance.
  

This clause was introduced by the 17th amendment that was approved in November 1997 following a ruling by the Supreme Court that stated that the confidentiality of cabinet meetings was inviolate. The new clause allows a tribunal of enquiry to apply to the High Court for an order to breach the confidentiality in cases of overriding public interest.

It was thrown out last night that this might be a way to force the banking enquiry to be held in public. However, from my non legal reading of the above clause, this is not the case. An Oireachtas enquiry is not a tribunal, therefore the committee of enquiry cannot make such an application. This leaves it up to the Minister in charge of the enquiry who I assume will be Brian Lenihan in his role as Minister for Finance. But it seems highly unlikely that he will want the omerta broken since he and his colleagues are the ones who were making the decisions.

Even if such an application were granted by the High Court, I wonder what sort of record is kept of cabinet meetings. Are they recorded in audio or video? Is there a stenographer in the corner typing away furiously? Is it just notes that are scribbled by Ministers? Do assistants and heads of department attend cabinet to help their Minister, or are they just summoned when required? Would breaching the confidentiality require some form of mature recollection by the cabinet members?

Constitution Week?

This evening the Exam Hall in TCD hosts a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution followed by a Q&A session chaired by John Bowman. Seems like it is the place to be as almost all of the 330 available tickets have been snapped up. The official business will consist of formal submissions by various politics students to the Committee on the topic of electoral reform. It will be interesting to see if they start advocating assorted list systems or just tinkering with the existing multi-seat setup.

The Q&A session is where the real sparks will fly (hopefully!) as the general public will be allowed contribute to the debate. I'm expecting all sorts of weird and wacky proposals and comments from the usual lunatic fringe. The reform seminar that was held last June had an interesting set of contributors from academia, the media, politics and the hoi-poloi. If the quality of discussion is anywhere close to that, then we should be in for a treat.

Then on Thursday, Leviathan starts up again with a show on re-writing the Constituion. While this event may be slightly lower brow than tonight's, again it should be an entertaining and informative evening. I guess most of the attendees at this will also have been at the TCD event so hopefully the two events won't end up covering the same ground.