A former Supreme Court judge [1] has warned against protecting the rights of carers in the home in the constitution [2], claiming that it would be difficult to define and would also be contrary to the separation of powers.
Her intervention came as support groups said that the Government risked sending a message that it did not value the unpaid work of stay-at-home parents and carers if it did not create an amendment to replace article 41.2.
Catherine McGuinness said that calls to replace a constitutional reference to a woman’s place in the home with a new gender-neutral amendment could have unintended consequences and appeared to back the Government’s preferred path of simply repealing the clause and not replacing it with anything.