Who wears the apron?

The Last Straw: As a member of Ireland's largest minority, I was embarrassed by the findings of the ESRI's National Time-Use Survey.

The news that most men are still not doing a fair share of housework - or any - is a setback for relations with the majority community, and will only encourage those women who would like to replace us with contract staff from eastern Europe. For what it's worth, this column reiterates its commitment to achieving the UN interim target of a 35 per cent share in household duties by 2025 (resources permitting).

But the question of how accurate the survey was needs to be addressed, in passing. After all, the "light" diary methodology - which required participants to record brief details of their activities during two 24-hour periods - has obvious limitations. The "heavy" diary method also used by researchers might have given more information. On the other hand, it would have required more work, so I suppose there was a risk that male participants wouldn't fill it in.

The ESRI concedes that a year-long survey would have been more representative than the time-frame - April to July 2005 - imposed here. The daily 2 hrs 4 mins that the average man spent watching television seems high, and it's worth recalling that this period included the Champions League final, which went to extra time (and penalties). That'd be the 2 hrs 4 mins, right there.

The figures for weekend phone use look suspicious too. Not to engage in wild generalisations or anything, but if men really do spend almost the same time on the phone (18 mins) as women (19 mins), my name is Wayne Rooney. We all know that the average man could ring all his friends consecutively to discuss how they felt about their lives, and together they'd struggle to sustain the conversation for anything near 18 minutes.

As for women, I'm not suggesting they lied about time spent on the phone. I'm just saying they might have lost track. Either that or some of it was reallocated in the diary to "caring activities". This would be legitimate enough. Women do spend a lot of phone time reassuring each other ("I know! - mine doesn't do any housework either"). When I raised this with one close female acquaintance, who asks to remain nameless, she said that what it added to the phone bill it saved on "counselling".

But even if the survey is completely accurate, the question is how - in the language of the peace process - we can move the situation forward. I suggest the first thing we should do is separate issues like cooking and childcare, which everyone agrees are necessary, from the whole cleaning/tidying thing. Because there's no use pretending otherwise: there are big cultural differences here between men and women.

In our culture, much of the cleaning that women consider essential to physical and mental well-being is entirely optional. It's not that we like dirt. We just have a higher tolerance of it. And when we do engage in cleaning, we will always struggle to meet the standards women have in this area. I'll give a hypothetical example involving the aforementioned female acquaintance, who still wishes to be nameless, and our seven-month old baby.

Say the former is distracted by something - a phone call from a female friend, perhaps - just after the baby has caused a category-A emission incident in the living room. And say, in keeping with the survey, she ends the call 19 minutes later (because the phone line has been cut by a falling tree) to find that the spillage has been cleaned up. Will she be happy? No. At least not until she finds out, by subtle detective work or direct cross-examination, exactly how the spillage was dealt with.

She will want to know if I used the "light" cleaning methodology popular with men, which may remove the immediate evidence while leaving invisible microbes, from which a fungal growth will emerge next week. Or the more scientific "heavy" cleaning preferred by women, and supported by the vast store of stain removal knowledge that persons of the female gender seem to have. If the latter, she will still need to know which cloth I used, and where it is now.

I'm not even going to touch issues like the amount of tidying women do in case other women visit, because that would only cause trouble. The point is that women have set the standards in this area, without consultation, and are seeking to devolve half the work while retaining all the control. I could suggest ways out of this impasse, and I'd love to. Unfortunately, as I always say when invited to wash the floor, I have a big pile of newspapers here and they're not going to read themselves.