What an upsurge of anger, hostility and hurt the Budget unleashed a month ago. What swings of opinion. The pendulum is still out there ready to turn and crash back on top of us all with the Finance Bill, provoking who knows what new rounds of abuse.
The strange thing about the abuse is that everyone feels like they are on the receiving end: Charlie McCreevy, women and men at home, women in the workplace, older women, younger women. Everyone has been licking their wounds over Christmas.
Women who have opted to stay out of paid employment have been variously characterised as right wing, whinging, squealing, emotional and hysterical. That's just a selection of the language which has appeared in print - words mainly reserved for demanding children. No wonder women in the home feel they are not accorded respect. Women who have opted to pay for childcare have spoken and written movingly of their feelings of hurt at implicit criticisms of their lifestyle choices. Each side feels raw.
The question is: are there two sides at all? In my view we have been sucked into a phoney war. Today's woman at work is tomorrow's woman in the home is next year's woman back in paid employment again. In the world of career breaks and job-sharing that is the reality of life for many women and for an increasing number of men.
There is on all sides a shared understanding of the need for more civilised parental leave, greater flexibility from employers, a more comprehensive and better-funded childcare system, increased child benefit. Add to that list a tax and social welfare system which makes it easier, not harder, for people to balance those tough decisions about who should care for the kids and you have every parent's wish list. So if we are all on the same side, why are we fighting?
I suppose there always are petty jealousies between people: the woman who cannot escape her toddler even for a moment's privacy in the toilet envies her sister who leaves for work showered, made up and mentally alert in the morning; the parent returning with a sleepy child from creche envies the homecooked meal and the comparative sense of repose in the house of a full-time homemaker.
Usually, however, we recognise petty jealousies for what they are and accept the downsides of our choices. We recognise that you cannot have it all, and every choice in life involves sacrifice. That's what maturation is all about, surely? But not this time. This Budget took the lid off a Pandora's box of anger and resentment. On reflection, it's not hard to see why. For, after all, we live in a society which has none of that wish list which would make parenting easier, so women who have opted to stay at home are angry that the workplace was so unfriendly to their needs and that society appears not to value their contribution now. And women who are in paid employment are grappling with the unfriendly workplace while wishing they could have more time with their children. What all women need to do now is to line up the right target in their sights.
Let's be clear about the wrong targets - one another. There are those, among them writers in this newspaper, who saw the response of women to the Budget as a right-wing backlash, the naked self-interest of women in the home who, with their partners, were about to be denied the hefty tax relief offered to dual-earning couples with or without children. Since this discrimination worked only against couples with one earner on over £28,000 a year, these women have been portrayed as pampered "trophy wives". This is grossly unfair. It is also an unduly pessimistic view of where women are at in Ireland today. In budgetary terms, it misses the plot entirely.
I was listening to what women and men were saying last month. Many of those who opposed the Budget's approach to individualisation were, like this writer, potential beneficiaries. I spoke to many people who were both earning but who were deeply disturbed by the values implicit in the Budget.
I don't mean they were leaping to the defence of old-fashioned family values. I mean they had a shrewd understanding that this Budget put growth and greed first and people second. And it was all of a piece: the niggardly approach to social welfare and the lower-paid, the generosity to the rich and, yes, the individualisation proposals. The important point about individualisation as introduced in this Budget is that it ignored children. This cannot be said often enough.
Opponents of the Budget were not looking for more money for well-off households (many felt it immoral that they personally stood to gain from the Budget). They were appalled at the fact that the tax code was about to cease recognising the necessity that children should be cared for. Virtually every writer on individualisation, from the ESRI to Combat Poverty to the trade unions, had recommended that individualisation should be accompanied by sizeable increases in child benefit to restore balance between households with children and those without. Yet, even in response to protest, the Government ham-fistedly introduced a stay-at-home spouses' allowance and again ignored this crucial piece of the jigsaw. The Budget debate continues to be about children.
As Combat Poverty has pointed out, the risk of poverty for families with children is 44 per cent, compared to 15 per cent for couples without children. Increased child benefit is of equal value whether both partners are working or not. It can pay for childcare whether supplied by the child's own parent or someone else. But children didn't feature in this Budget.
It is incredible to me how the Department of Finance and the Minister walked into this one. A working group established by the Government reported in detail last August on the tax treatment of families. It leant towards individualisation but saw it as an opportunity to re-target resources towards children. The Department of Social Affairs said: "It is accepted that some of the costs of raising children should be shared by the entire community." The Department of Finance (ever the villain of the piece) said there was a "mistaken premise that the existing married treatment is a subvention to childcare" - tell us about it, boys. If tax relief were to be reduced for one-earner households, the revenue gained would go to cutting taxes, not childcare, the Department made quite clear. So there you have it, the post-Budget argument in cold print published last August. No hysteria here, no whinging, but the same essential disagreement. The same essential conflict of world views - Social Affairs saw the needs of children, Finance the imperative of tax-cutting.
Of course, the Department of Finance has lost its sense of history. Before the introduction of the current married treatment following the Murphy judgment of 1977 there were significant child tax allowances. These were rapidly eroded and disappeared in response to the costs of the married tax treatment, which thus became the tax system's way of recognising children. That's the point the Department of Finance is missing.
The post-Budget argument should not in truth have been about or between women but about children - who after all are the responsibility of both parents and society. The phrase getting women "back to work" was so disturbing precisely because it failed to recognise the importance of caring for children.
As to a woman's place? The decision as to how to rear one's child and how to balance that with self-realisation is intimate and deeply personal, needs constant review and is not for anyone else to judge. For some, mothering is infinitely more fulfilling than any other job; for others there is great joy and relief in sharing a child with a loving carer who brings fresh and different qualities into the child's life; for others still there is no choice because of economic necessity.
Mary Holland has written of how as a mother she worked from necessity but also of how proud she was of the part she played in reporting Northern Ireland. How rightly proud. Mary was one of the icons of my youth. I bought Hibernia just to read her. She was up there with Marys Robinson and Maher in the panoply of saints for young, would-be feminists in the 1970s. How grateful we were to them for raising our sights and for giving us much-needed role models.
We have done our best to follow their lead, some of us working at or from home, some in the workplace. The issues shift, the principles remain the same. Women have a right to equality. Women and men have a right to choose how to live their lives unconstrained by poverty or prejudice.
In my 30s, profound illness took from me all my choices - I could no longer either do my job or care for my child. That's rock bottom. That's where priorities become apparent. For most of us, human relationships come first, work is a means to an end. A woman's place is where she is happiest.
Tomorrow: Finola Bruton on how the Budget narrowed choice - and pitted woman against woman.
