Challenging the manosphere and tradwive narratives - August, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I welcome the Government's new campaign challenging manosphere and tradwife narratives ("'Tradwife' and 'manosphere' content's influence growing in Ireland, says National Women's Council," August 6th). But if we are serious about inoculating young people against the idea that a woman's place is in the home, we might start by taking a closer look at Irish society.
Let's take our primary schools for example. Some 88% operate under Catholic patronage -- an institution that is not exactly a beacon of gender equality: campaigning against divorce, contraception and abortion rights at every turn, and effectively still treats women as second class citizens. Perhaps the Government could simultaneously address this albatross, and remove the Catholic Church's grip on our schools.
Then there is the Constitution. In 2024, voters were asked whether to broaden the definition of "the Family" beyond marriage, and to strike out Article 41.2's language about a woman's "life within the home." Both proposals were resoundingly rejected, some by a two-to-one margin. The effect is that the capital-F Family in Irish law remains the married unit. For example, unmarried partners still face a less favourable position on inheritance and tax than their married counterparts, among other indignities.
And consider parental leave: 26 weeks of paid maternity leave against two weeks of paid paternity leave. Long before any algorithm reaches a teenager, we have already engineered this outcome, those months at home cement the mother as the de facto contact for the GP, the créche, the WhatsApp group. Small wonder so many women recognise something of their own lives in the trad-wife story.
Of course, none of this is the same as telling young girls their place is in the home as these trad wife influencers are doing. But when Irish society (in law and norms) still assumes the same nuclear, married household as their baseline, we should ask how different that baseline really is from the fantasy the trad-wife influencers are selling us.
Belle Burden's divorce memoir and the reality of marriage - June, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
Jennifer O’Connell’s piece on Belle Burden’s divorce memoir raises a question worth turning on its head: never mind whether the memoir tells the whole truth about a marriage, does *marriage* tell the whole truth about what it asks of women?
Women have good reason to be sceptical of the institution itself. The philosopher Clare Chambers has argued that marriage rewards only those who organise their lives in one particular and legally recognised way. Why should the state privilege this configuration above all others? The answer has historically had less to do with love than with property, inheritance, and the control of women’s bodies and labour.
Marriage has played a significant role in maintaining the wider regime of gender inequality, used to consolidate legal and economic oppression by confining women to a private sphere in which they remain disadvantaged. Perhaps no formulation captures this more sharply than that of feminist Sheila Cronan: “the marriage contract is the only important legal contract in which the terms are not listed.” Those unwritten terms? A full-time (unpaid) job: caring, cooking, cleaning. Not to mention the mental load of remembering, reminding, checking, and scheduling, that women, and mothers in particular, know all too well.
The practical disadvantages are not relics. Women who reduce hours or leave the workforce to raise children, and Irish women still do this at far higher rates than men, incur lasting earnings penalties, pension deficits, and financial dependency. The “marriage bonus” economists identify largely accrues to men; the marriage penalty falls on women. At the symbolic level, to refuse marriage is, for some, to invite suspicion or pity.
None of this means individual marriages cannot be loving and freely chosen. But the institution is not reducible to its best instances.
It’s possible that Irish women are starting to understand this. Almost one in five couples now cohabit. The marriage rate has fallen over 20% in a decade, to 3.8 per 1,000 in 2024, down from 4.8 in 2014. These are not the numbers of a society that enthusiastically endorses marriage. They’re the numbers of a society quietly voting with its feet.
Exemption from Irish is not the same as religious discrimination in school - April, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I read Breda O’Brien’s piece (“Why are religious schools seen as divisive but Irish language schools are not?”) with some curiousity today.
She says “No one seriously suggests that someone with an exemption from Irish is being discriminated against or excluded by having to be around those who are studying it, or that the subject should be dropped entirely or taught after school.”
Breda neglects to mention that unlike religion, race or sexual orientation, being exempted from Irish at school is not grounds for discrimination under the Equal Status Act. Irish is a language, while faith formation is a subjective belief system. There is a profound difference between a student who is exempted from a subject and a student whose constitutional rights to freedom of religion and belief are violated on a daily basis.