Norma Smurfit, it appears, is now an indicator of poverty in Ireland. This, at least, is one of the implications of the recently-published United Nations Human Development Report 1998, which avers that the Republic of Ireland has the second-highest concentration of poverty in the west.
In reporting the UN findings, the media jumped upon the report's assertion that Irish women, as The Irish Times front page headline put it, are "worse off than in 16 industrial states surveyed". This, to judge by the media treatment, was among the most appalling of the indictments served up by the UN report.
The basis for this assertion is relative levels of earned income. According to the UN figures, men earn 73.2 per cent of income in this State, while women earn 26.8 per cent. Thus, Norma Smurfit, who because of the prudent business activities of her former husband's family has no need to work and is able to devote much of her time to an admirable involvement in charitable causes, is defined as poor.
Finola Bruton, who has made much of her desire to stay at home and mind her children, rather than going out to work to supplement her wealthy farmer/politician husband's income, is evidence of hidden hardship in Irish society.
Nobody except one of our more naive economists would dispute that poverty is a profound and escalating problem here. This UN report therefore contains important and urgent messages for Irish society. But the manner of its presentation and treatment in the public arena, far from increasing understanding of poverty, has resulted in its trivialisation.
There is a great deal of other information in this report, but most of it has been buried in the scramble by the usual propagandists to use the findings relating to women to promote their all-too familiar agenda and fuel their favourite victimology.
The UN findings on the position of women are close to suggesting the opposite of the truth. It is true that more men than women are in paid work in this State and that, in general, men earn more. But that does not amount to evidence that women in general are poorer than men, or that Irish society is poorer than if male/female levels of earned income were the same.
There are at least a dozen men in my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances who, in slightly varying circumstances, have been banished from the homes which they lovingly created for their families. I'm pretty sure that many readers will know several men in similar circumstances.
These men continue to pay mortgages on the homes they have had to vacate. Their earned incomes continue to be at the disposal of their former households, now in the absolute control of their former wives.
They have limited access to the children they fathered and loved from the moment of conception. Most of them now live in tiny bedsit rooms in the most dilapidated parts of various Irish towns and cities, from where they dazedly survey the debris of their shattered lives.
These catastrophic consequences are the result in most cases of the failure of these men to live up to the expectations of their spouses.
But these men, according to the UN, are not poor: their ex-wives are poor. This is unadulterated nonsense. Studies in the United States - the only western country to come out of the UN survey worse than Ireland - have shown that, when it comes to what is termed "net worth", women who are heads of households are almost 50 per cent better off than men who are heads of households.
Net worth is defined as the difference between liabilities and assets. Men, in general, have greater spending obligations and therefore less disposable income. Men, in general, have ultimate responsibility for providing for homes, food, and other everyday expenditures. Often regardless of earning capacities or status, they must support their wives or ex-wives and children, as well as themselves.
Despite the clamour for what is termed equality, it is all but unheard of for the situation to be reversed. Regardless of circumstances, men are not entitled to expect their ex-wives to support them.
Most men would welcome genuine equality, but, in truth, those who claim to campaign for this objective are really asking that women be given the same rights as men but with the additional `right" to refuse certain responsibilities which men have borne for centuries.
Moreover, as anyone who watches television adverts with even a modicum of attention will be aware, women now far outstrip men in most areas of consumer spending. Virtually all advertising is aimed at women, and with good reason. Even when you include major purchases like motor cars, women come out top of the spending league.
A survey by a building society in Britain a few years back found that women were the primary decision-makers in most areas connected with money. About three-quarters of major decisions relating to homes, furnishings etc. are made by women, who also decide on almost all routine domestic expenditures, including food, children's clothes and so forth. This survey also found that in 65 per cent of cases the woman decided which make of car to buy.
The simple truth is that, in general, men earn more and women spend more. And not only do women spend more on themselves - men spend far more on women than on themselves. Who is richer - he who earns or she who consumes? Wherein lies the essence of economic power? In fact, the UN report has answered this question by asserting that consumption is the "life-blood of human advances". By this logic, the average woman is twice as privileged as the average man.
If some individual or organisation were to publish, as evidence of Irish poverty, details of the number of Irish men not lucky enough to have wives prepared to go out and work to top up the family income, that individual or organisation would lose all credibility. This is because, in certain convenient circumstances, it is deemed appropriate to recognise that the configuration of the Irish workplace is the consequence not of resistance to gender equality but of long-time cultural practice.
We live in a society in which the division of labour between men and women, while changing fast, still broadly conforms to a model not long ago regarded as an eminently sensible way of organising our affairs, but now deemed to be evidence of backwardness and penury.
There is widespread poverty in Ireland, and it affects a significant minority of women. But this form of analysis amounts to a travesty of the truth that this society offers far more to the woman in need than to a man in similar circumstances. What the report is really saying, of course, is not that Ireland is poor. It is saying that Ireland is not sufficiently like Sweden to be regarded as genuinely "modern".