Maternal Mental Health Supports: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel Ar an gcéad dul síos, tacaím le Senator Cosgrove and Senator Harmon in front of me on this enlightened and, as always, timely motion for the House to consider regarding the arrival of new life on our planet and country and all that goes with that. Back in the day, when I was being educated in St. Patrick's College in Drumcondra to befit me for a life of teaching, one of the most weighty tomes we had on our library shelves was a book called Child Development and Personality . I am sure Senator Clonan will probably remember that. It was a doorstopper of a book. Nonetheless, it was a very useful book and we reverted to it time and again when training to be teachers. The point I am making is that when my own children came along, I felt that as a person trained as an educationalist I was probably a bit more advantaged than the normal young man at the time because I had been professionally taught to look into the development, arrival, growth and personality of children. That was a rich resource given to me in parenting. Having said that, in the same way most other parents would acknowledge, and we have lots of parents in this room, the one thing they will agree with me in saying is that parenting is not an exact science. When it starts, most of us muddle through trauma, nights of sleeplessness and exhaustion and dissociation from normal working life. Lots of things go on that make it a difficult time, notwithstanding the great joy of new life and all that goes with it. I looked at a couple of statistics in preparation for our debate this afternoon. I do not want to be in any way ungenerous to the motion because it is important that we acknowledge the great difficulty that assails the bodies and minds of women in expecting children, delivering them and nurturing them afterwards. It is an immensely challenging time. However, I do not want us to think it is just a female obligation because we have to acknowledge that we have a male input into this. Depending on the level of support those males get, so will be the benefit for that child as the child grows up. I would like to look at the paternity benefits and provisions that are made for men in Ireland. After the arrival of a child, they get 14 days of statutory leave. If you look down through the EU list, that is pretty well at the bottom of the pile. It goes significantly upwards to countries like the Netherlands, which has 40-odd days. Spain is at the top of the group with 114 days of paternity leave. All the statistics show that depending on the level of the father's engagement in the time after the birth, both supporting his partner and supporting the child, so will be the benefits that redound on the child as it goes through preschool, schooling years and afterwards. We must not, as a society, see this as just supporting the mental and physical health of women. The men support the child as well and they support their partners. The whole family unit, the teaghlach Senator Clonan mentioned, will be greatly enhanced if there are more supports in our society for men as well. I know from being a principal in a rural area that a lot of young men will ask me what training they got to be a father. A lot of these chaps are parenting in their early 20s, at a time when they self-admit that they are immature young men. To expect them to take on the support of a partner and the support of a child, to hold down a job, to go through sleepless nights and all of those things is a big ask. We should also look at the suicide rates in males, where 77% of the population in the suicide stakes are male. The two highest cohorts are men between the ages of 15 and 25 and between the ages of 40 and 44. That also tells a story of a vulnerability in men. I know for a fact that men are very unlikely to admit they are failing, they are weak or they are not coping. Consequently, they may not reach out to get the supports they need at a time of great stress in their lives and their family lives. I do not want this to be misinterpreted in any way as a sort of a gender conflict or anything like that. I absolutely praise the Senator for bringing forward this motion, but I want us to stop for a moment in recognition of the fact that this is a two-way street. Young men, in particular, and fathers in general need lots of support as well. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:37+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-11