The Irish Labour Party likes to pretend it’s a moderate, modern, mainstream party with no radical agenda whatsoever that can be trusted with the economy and society. The old guard – the trots, and stickies, and radical socialists, and crazy liberals are generally kept upstairs in a darkened room where nobody can see them. But make no mistake, they’re there. And occasionally, they get let loose for an afternoon. Like Ivana Bacik today.
Ivana Bacik is a very smart woman. But like most liberal academics, her grip on the realities of everyday economic life is tenuous, to say the least. Which is why she’s out this afternoon, pushing the Labour Party’s latest dose of craziness:
Speaking today at a Dublin Book Festival event on the subject ‘Legacies of Feminism’, Senator Ivana Bacik called for a change in the law to enable male employees to take paid paternity leave.
Now, let’s knock the bottles off the wall. The main critique, internationally, of Ireland, is that we have allowed our economic competitiveness to slide and the cost of doing business here to rise. This is costing us investment, and jobs. At a time when it is imperative that we tackle rising energy costs, excessive regulation, and take other steps to attract inward investment, Senator Bacik wants to create another third-generation right, as she herself would call it. In this case, she would force employers to pay men for time off when their partner has a child.
I think we can agree that this would raise costs on small businesses (and indeed all businesses), so raving on about it is of limited use. I’d rather tackle the idea that any such right exists to begin with.
We live in a society that encourages (or at least aspires to encourage) the idea of personal responsibility. We are, quite rightly, taking steps to ensure that people take responsibility for their retirement, to cite just the one example. There are many others. The basic idea is that we are responsible for ourselves, so far as we are able, and also responsible for the collective wellbeing through the taxes we pay to government. I know I’m using boringly simple language here, but it’s a boringly simple concept.
Ivana would like to change that. She would like to take away from men the responsibility to be good fathers to their children and place an obligation on the rest of us to assist fathers in that goal. She thinks that it is our duty to pay a little extra so a father can spend some time with his child at no extra cost. But isn’t the cost part of being a father? Aren’t we supposed to sacrifice to be good parents? Aren’t fathers (and indeed, mothers) supposed to be proud of the fact that they’ve worked long and hard to provide for their children?
I think they are. This is another step down the ideological path that says that it is the duty of the state to make life easy for everyone. It’s the path that says that all life’s challenges should be abrogated for us and that we should all have exactly the same experiences and that they should come at no cost. It’s the road to ruin, economically, and ideologically. The Labour Party hasn’t changed. And every so often, they prove it.
