Some private companies applied it. A colleague of mine told me she had to leave a private sector job because she got married. She ended up in the HSE when she was in her early 50s.
Why don’t women who suffered the ‘Marriage Ban’ sue the State?
- Thread starter Gordon Gekko
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NoRegretsCoyote
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The marriage bar was abolished in 1974. A 21-year-old who was forced to resign on marriage would be 70 now.
The vast majority of women who ever suffered from this policy are by now deceased.
Right Winger
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It also applied in the banks, and in some semistates like Aer Lingus. That spawned an interesting court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. What happened was that after the marriage bar was lifted quite a few hostesses (as they were then called!) were re-employed. However, they were taken back on as if they were new recruits, on lesser pay and terms and conditions than their unmarried colleagues, with equivalent service, who hadn't had to resign on marriage. As this was now after the 1977 Equality Act had come into effect, that later unequal treatment was found to be unlawful discrimination and they eventually, many, many years later, got some compensation.
However, that was a very specific case, with its own very specific peculiarities, and would not appear to have any wider general application. Furthermore (and relevant to the OP's question) it focuses on events after re-employment and there doesn't appear to have been any argument made that the initial marriage bar was unlawful or unconstitutional. One must presume legal advice to this effect prevailed.
Black Sheep
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Fortunately the life span of women who worked in the civil service is the same as those who did not. That's about 82.
I'm part of a group of 10 former civil servants who still get together a couple of times a year and we have only lost one but we all still bear the pension scars.
I'm part of a group of 10 former civil servants who still get together a couple of times a year and we have only lost one but we all still bear the pension scars.
But Class D payments weren't around in 1974. Presumably you mean WOPS?
We were certainly told Ireland was in a recession in 1975 when I finished the LC. Almost everyone who wasn't going straight to university in my class emigrated. I think one person got a job in Ireland. It was almost impossible to get a job, so we mostly emigrated. Whatever the stats and economists say.
She's still alive, but she's in her in her late 70s,possibly 80s. She retired a good few years ago, I can't remember exactly but I still call her a colleague.
I don't know if it was officially a recession but money was tight in out house of 5 kids. Obviously we didn't notice but my Mom told me she worried about money / paying bills etc a lot until we got jobs.
T McGibney
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There was a sharp recession in Ireland in the mid-70s, triggered by a rapid rise in oil prices and runaway international inflation. The same conditions caused the IMF to take over management of the British exchequer in 1976.
NoRegretsCoyote
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Hardly “sharp” - GDP per capita fell by 0.2% in 1976.
Overall the 1970s saw per capita GDP growth of nearly 50%.
A lot of this growth was due to women entering or staying in the workforce of course!
We have got into semantics about the word “recession” - GDP and other acronyms are a well used shield describing recession. That’s why I used the words “real recession” and to be blatant the recession of 2008* was a doddle compared to real recessions earlier. When one of our offspring graduated from university she along with 100 per cent of graduates of the faculty emigrated to find employment. That was a real recession.
*later amended for correction as pointed out by @Protocol.
*later amended for correction as pointed out by @Protocol.
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T McGibney
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Sharp enough if you were at the wrong end of it. Remember the craic on Hall's Pictorial Weekly about the Minister for Hardship et al?
The 2000s also saw excellent per capita GNP growth but also a vicious recession.
Here is the data from the CSO, since 1970.
See table 6.
There was a slowdown in 1974/1975/1976, okay, but it was not a recession.
1980 and 1981 was another slowdown, and the recession was 1982 and 1983.
1984 to 1986 weren't great.
My poor Mam, who died last year, was terribly bitter and scarred by the loss of her job and career in a bank under the marriage ban. I thought about helping her sue as it was a terrible rule that impacted her life, career and mental health.
The attitude of some posters here demonstrates that the attitude to women and their careers remains problematic. I’d like to see their reaction if they’d been forced out of their jobs with no viable alternative into the family home . Would they say as sure it’s grand became I had a few kids then and my pension got paid out.
As a women who is successful in my career I get asked a lot for career advice, including about how to deal with discrimination by other women. Only yesterday I met with a younger woman who was passed over for partnership last year on the basis of her gender in a law firm. We’d met last year at her request to discuss her options. She took me to lunch yesterday to say thanks. I hadn’t seen her since our conversation last year. I’d spotted in LinkedIn that she’d gone in-house and assumed that, like many others, she’d just give up and left.
Yesterday she told me that she’d taken them to the WRC and had settled with them for a six figure sum. She’s subject to a NDA and cannot speak about the situation with anyone except those that she had spoken to about it prior to settling. We were not celebrating her win or the pay off. She is still off track on her career path now. She left the big five law firm and is currently trying to get back on track.
Getting back to my poor mother, I could not see an action to take on the marriage ban. The constitution still has women in the home with the grubby fingerprints of Catholic suppression of women all over it. Membership of the EU brought with it mandatory laws on discrimination thankfully. I shudder to think about what my own career would look like if we’d had the successive governments we’ve had since 1973 without those requirements to implement EU worker rights. Ostensibly I am as senior as I can get in my professional life but I know I have not earned many thousands that my male peers have. There is still so much discrimination in Irish business life, and professions. You can’t change a society or culture quickly, and men continue to hold much more power in professions.Many just don’t see the discrimination as such. I have a daughter 9 and depressingly I think she will encounter it also. I have told my kids about the marriage ban, it is a scandal that should not be forgotten. We also have discussed the gender pay gap, why the girls in the GAA and soccer teams don’t get the same quality of training as the boys, the lack of technical skills challenges in girls pink toy vs those marketed to boys. Start children seeing the world around them early.
Thanks Gordon for bringing up this topic. Made me think about poor Mam.
The attitude of some posters here demonstrates that the attitude to women and their careers remains problematic. I’d like to see their reaction if they’d been forced out of their jobs with no viable alternative into the family home . Would they say as sure it’s grand became I had a few kids then and my pension got paid out.
As a women who is successful in my career I get asked a lot for career advice, including about how to deal with discrimination by other women. Only yesterday I met with a younger woman who was passed over for partnership last year on the basis of her gender in a law firm. We’d met last year at her request to discuss her options. She took me to lunch yesterday to say thanks. I hadn’t seen her since our conversation last year. I’d spotted in LinkedIn that she’d gone in-house and assumed that, like many others, she’d just give up and left.
Yesterday she told me that she’d taken them to the WRC and had settled with them for a six figure sum. She’s subject to a NDA and cannot speak about the situation with anyone except those that she had spoken to about it prior to settling. We were not celebrating her win or the pay off. She is still off track on her career path now. She left the big five law firm and is currently trying to get back on track.
Getting back to my poor mother, I could not see an action to take on the marriage ban. The constitution still has women in the home with the grubby fingerprints of Catholic suppression of women all over it. Membership of the EU brought with it mandatory laws on discrimination thankfully. I shudder to think about what my own career would look like if we’d had the successive governments we’ve had since 1973 without those requirements to implement EU worker rights. Ostensibly I am as senior as I can get in my professional life but I know I have not earned many thousands that my male peers have. There is still so much discrimination in Irish business life, and professions. You can’t change a society or culture quickly, and men continue to hold much more power in professions.Many just don’t see the discrimination as such. I have a daughter 9 and depressingly I think she will encounter it also. I have told my kids about the marriage ban, it is a scandal that should not be forgotten. We also have discussed the gender pay gap, why the girls in the GAA and soccer teams don’t get the same quality of training as the boys, the lack of technical skills challenges in girls pink toy vs those marketed to boys. Start children seeing the world around them early.
Thanks Gordon for bringing up this topic. Made me think about poor Mam.
WaterWater
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We did. In the Bank of Ireland and AIB, women received a sum of money on resignation but men didn't. A group of us men issued legal proceedings and it was settled out of court.
1. We live in better times now. We're not in a perfect world and never will be. In my 70+ years on this planet I've come across many forms of discrimination in the workplace against men and women most of which could not be proved although everybody "knew" what was going on. Trade Unions seem to have shirked responsibility too on the issue claiming inability to prove conclusively.
2. I must say that I came across several instances where women did themselves no favours and they supported cases of discrimination against their own gender and otherwise for some reason or other. Honest honesty isn't overly prevalent among rats in a rat-race.
2. I must say that I came across several instances where women did themselves no favours and they supported cases of discrimination against their own gender and otherwise for some reason or other. Honest honesty isn't overly prevalent among rats in a rat-race.
Early Riser
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I don't think the Constitutional position changed the position for women in any way. The "marriage ban" was there well before the Constitution was enacted. And the relevant clause declares :
“The state recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” And that “the state shall, therefore, endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home."
This provision was not "regressive" for its time. The marriage bar was still active in the UK then (and it was from the UK that we inherited it). Perhaps one could say that the most striking thing about this provision was that it was ignored, ie, nothing was done to support the women/mothers in the home economically - they didn't even get state pension credits.
I am not at all arguing that the marriage bar was not discriminatory but it needs to seen in its cultural and historical context. The UK Foreign Office ended their marriage bar in 1973 at approximately the same time as Ireland (1973) and for the same reason - to comply with EU law. It was not in place because of any "constitutional provision" or from the influence of the Catholic church. More generally the UK ended its marriage bars in the aftermath of the Second World War - the impetus was the labour shortage in the UK at the time and also the reality that women had been a mainstay of the domestic workforce during the war years. It was not "progressive thinking" that led to the change in the UK but the changing social and economic context at the time. The context in Ireland at that time was different.
I remember the controversy about the removal of the marriage bar in Ireland. My mother was very much against its removal. It was not from a position of privilege - we lived on a small farm and my mother worked hard seven days a week, both in the house and on the farm. Perhaps, it was that she had 5 sons. And that she had seen many of her own family disappear through emigration because of lack of opportunities at home. She feared that the ending of the marriage bar would worsen the situation, with privileged two-income households closing off opportunities to those who were less privileged and influential (who would end up with nothing at home or have to emigrate). I don't recall my father having any strong views for or against the ban.
I am not in way suggesting that the ban was "right" or indeed "wrong". But it needs to put in its historical context. And I am certainly glad it ended.
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The marriage ban was a symptom of a rotten and repressive culture to which everyone was exposed at the time.
The business environment was the equivalent of the Wild West at the time with chancers able to do what they liked with impunity. Workers had few rights.
Thanks largely to EU membership, the country and society has been transformed. It’s still not perfect but we live in a much more progressive environment than in previous decades and we have much more reason to be optimistic and hopeful. It’s not always healthy to dwell on the past.
Bad things still happen and people need to held accountable, but a lot of the time it can just be categorised under “that’s life”.
The business environment was the equivalent of the Wild West at the time with chancers able to do what they liked with impunity. Workers had few rights.
Thanks largely to EU membership, the country and society has been transformed. It’s still not perfect but we live in a much more progressive environment than in previous decades and we have much more reason to be optimistic and hopeful. It’s not always healthy to dwell on the past.
Bad things still happen and people need to held accountable, but a lot of the time it can just be categorised under “that’s life”.