What took them so long? It was surely only a matter of time before someone came up with a series about 40-something gorgeous housewives in lovely homes, a kind of Sex and the Suburbs, to take over where Sex and the City left off. Despite, or because of having a title that sounds like a cheapo Internet porn site, Desperate Housewives is a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, writes Breda O'Brien
It continues a merry tradition of American network television, which is that so-called family networks offer enough glossy bonking to attract the viewers, but not enough to provoke a damaging backlash.
Of course, many of the fervent fans are themselves housewives, who love it because it is so far removed from their own lives. In fact, if you made a series like that in Ireland, you would probably have to call it Desperate to be housewives. Nowadays, you have to be in an income bracket comparable to the denizens of Wisteria Lane before you could even think about giving up the second income to stay at home.
Then, of course, there are the older Irish women, many of whom have been housewives for decades. Again, they tend to have more mundane concerns than say, Gabrielle of Desperate Housewives, who married her husband for money, but whose main concern seems to be how she can continue to get away with having it off with the 18-year-old gardener. No, if you are a 50-something Irish housewife, you might be worrying about what you are going to do when you reach pension age. There are many women who are shocked to discover that the State pension is all that they are entitled to.
Some of them have five or six years of what used to be called "stamps", that is, contributions towards pension, but it is not enough for even a partial contributory pension.
Nor is it easy to establish what you are entitled to, because the system is so complex. For example, if your husband has a contributory pension, you may be eligible for a Qualified Adult Allowance, which is two-thirds of a full contributory pension.
The recipient is paid this allowance directly, but it is means-tested, and even modest personal means will reduce it still further. There had been promises to make it the equivalent of a full contributory pension, but no progress was made on this in the 2005 Budget.
The Government is already running scared about pensions, not least because it fears that it will not be able to meet existing pension promises, because demographics are dictating that there will be fewer and fewer earners supporting more and more people.
As a result, it is pushing people towards saving for their own retirement. It is an interesting question, as to how people who by definition have no income of their own because they gave up work to care, are supposed to then save for pensions.
The so-called pensions time-bomb is one concern, but there are others. As the numbers of people working full-time in the home fall, and the reality is that most of these are women, the State is realising that providing alternatives to care in the home, whether it be for small children or elderly people, is massively expensive. So the State is caught in a bind. It would like to encourage most women into the paid workforce, but at the same time it realises that this leads to unsustainable childcare and eldercare bills.
There are few incentives to become a full-time carer. It is difficult to access a carer's allowance, for example, and if you are a parent who wishes to stay at home, you suddenly realise you have become in many ways a non-person.
One couple I know who wished to purchase an alarm system in their joint names were advised that this would only slow down the credit application. It would be better to sign the forms in the name of the sole earner. More seriously, while the Government is encouraging people to provide for their own retirement through PRSAs, these really only make financial sense if you can claim tax relief on them. A person who has given up work has no independent income, and so cannot access tax relief. So PRSAs lose much, if not all, of their attraction.
What could the Government do? Well, the situation of some older women could be ameliorated by allowing them to purchase contributions that would bring them up to the level for a partial contributory pension. Of course, this would not address the needs of those who cannot afford to do this, but it would help some women.
For younger women and men who wish to work in the home, the best solution might be to increase child benefit greatly, to tax it, and to allow people to use part of it to contribute to a pension, just as people on employment benefit can do. This would need some working out, but it is something that should be seriously considered. Firstly, if it were done through some kind of voucher system, it would allow people to either use the money to help with the costs of giving up work, or with the costs of childcare. If it were the former, people could choose to make contributions towards a pension, which at the moment they are not allowed to do, even if they wish to.
The fact is, caring work costs money, no matter how it is provided. Is there a politician with the foresight to work out exactly how to help parents, and those with elderly dependants, to be able to care, without losing all entitlements in the process? What about it, Séamus? As I said, replacing the work of those who care in the home is desperately expensive.
Yet unless some kind of action is taken soon, the concept of a homemaker or home-carer may become obsolete.
There are huge social consequences arising from the disappearance of voluntary carers. Some estates have already become daytime deserts, and children may spend more time with paid carers than they do with parents. We need to ask ourselves, do we really want a situation where people who care at home are as rare as, say, an ugly actor in Desperate Housewives?