Would you ever have guessed - before the CSO's childcare survey - that nearly 60 per cent of families with young children take care of them with no help from anyone? Or that only a tiny fraction of such families overall have two parents in full-time work? asks Kathy Sheridan
These figures, allied to a steady fall in workforce participation by women in the 25 to 34 age group, suggest that the vast majority of young Irish children have the benefit of a full-time parent.
So what say you now, you doomsayers who built entire careers on apocalyptic pronouncements about the social devastation being wreaked by mythical armies of jack-booted harridans, aka working mothers?
What agendas were at work here? Who or what was responsible for the widespread notion that the "average" Irish family comprised two sparring, strung-out parents plus a couple of infants abandoned like dogs for 12-hour days?
I knew few families like that. When I sought them out for our commuter series, they were astonishingly hard to find. When I was pointed towards couples described as full-time workers, it was remarkable how many of the women were job-sharing or working two- or three-day weeks, or working from home or in jobs with family-friendly hours, such as teaching.
So, civilisation is safe for another minute or two, right? Apparently. As a 30-something chirrups in the Daily Telegraph, half her girlfriends "have given up work for their children. No one wants to be considered a career harpie". And what are you if not being a career harpie? A "Yummy Mummy" of course. They're "the ones who look immaculate at the school gate and make cupcakes for their children". Lovely. Note that it's not necessarily that they don't want to be career harpies; they don't want to be considered career harpies. Who exactly are they so desperate to please?
Anyway, that's where we are. Career harpies out. Yummy Mummies in. And what can be wrong with that? On the face of it, young women have nothing to prove (their mothers did that for them) and so, the choice is theirs, fully-informed and gloriously free of that icky old feminist baggage.
And yet, the other striking revelation of our commuter series research was how close to the 1950s model of family life this country has moved, often not by women's choice, but for reasons born of a thoroughly modern phenomenon.
The truly ugly face of commuting is not the healthy, unencumbered, young couples rising at dawn for the city-bound crawl. It's the mothers left behind, who watch their husbands drive off the estate at 6 or 7 a.m. and may not hear another adult voice until he returns, fit for nothing, 13 or 14 hours later.
In such circumstances, being a Yummy Mummy may be the only option (given the cost of childcare and the management permutations when two or three offspring are at different stages) but for some, it is the toughest option of all. They talk of wrenching loneliness and of being single parents in all but name. Nor does the medium-term look too rosy. What chances of a half-decent job, still less a career, 50 miles from the industrial heartland, in a region virtually abandoned by government?
Corporate Ireland is only partly to blame. Many of the family-friendly measures fought for by the feminists, such as job-sharing, have come to pass. We are assured that there's a sea-change in male attitudes.
Yet, why is it still the case that all else being equal - say, in banking or media - the overwhelming take-up of these concessions is by women? Where a few days' paid paternity leave is available, the National Family Friendly Committee's survey showed that not even a sixth had availed of it. Although fathers have a statutory right to 14 weeks of unpaid parental leave (which, combined with the mother's, could provide full-time parental care for nine months of a baby's crucial first year), only a tiny minority have opted for it.
If the absence of payment is the obstacle, where are the voices of the fathers' groups - so vocal in other respects - campaigning for change? But the problem is starkest at the higher echelons, where pay is least likely to be a barrier. In one top management survey, nearly a half said that juggling home and work was a struggle, yet only a quarter would trade lower pay for more personal time.
It's a conundrum. We're told such outlandish behaviour would draw derision and suspicion about a man's loyalty and commitment - an attitude that women have lived with for decades.
Meanwhile, in Corporate Country, fewer women will be around to temper the man-made rules of engagement, characterised by the war-games, childishness, cute hoorism and presenteeism that are anathema to most thinking people and their concept of what society is about.
And so, the spiral continues.
Are there any winners in this? How about the men swaggering home to the Yummy Mummies? Yummy.