Norma Foley’s Department of Children, Disability and Equality must be running out of ideological road if declaring war on ‘tradwives’ is the best they can do to advance gender equality.

Tradwives (traditional wives) are an internet phenomenon spearheaded by female influencers who have elevated the original housewife into a more aspirational ‘tradwife’ in a bid to flog domestic or beauty products to followers while paradoxically showing them how to make perfect sourdough.

But while their popularity online may be growing, in real life we are fast running out of tradwives. 

Statistics show that over half of Irish mothers work outside the home. 

And our birthrate has crashed by almost 18 per cent. 

Last year the fertility rate was 1.5 – far short of the magic population replacement level of 2.1.

Large families are central to the tradwife lifestyle, and the Mormon moms who pioneered it start propagating when they’re barely out their teens. 

The average age of a mother giving birth here is 33.3 years and for first-time mothers it’s 31.8 years.

We’re not really at the tradwife races, are we?

Higher education attainment is a factor but soaring house prices are really what militates against the likes of Maria Steen – who home-schools her brood – becoming more commonplace.

Unless a woman marries money or comes from wealth, she needs a wage to keep the show on the road and to hell with domesticity.

So why on earth is the Government worrying about Mná Na hÉireann chaining themselves to the kitchen sink? 

Will it not be happy until all women are climbing the corporate ladder and paying poor women to raise their babies and clean their homes?

This classist and elitist view has always been a thread through feminism. 

So, ironically, are condescension and deep-seated misogyny.

I’m part of a generation whose mothers were mostly housewives. 

Their unpaid labour and caring duties were taken for granted and frequently looked down upon compared to ‘man’s work’.

The tradwife may be a dubious construct but its redeeming feature is that it celebrates the effort involved in running a home and raising children.

Surely there are worse crimes than businesswomen making money from pretending to be fragrant 1950s housewives? 

It’s not as if their followers are under any illusions about being sold an escapist fantasy that becomes more attractive the more they juggle home and work and suffer burnout. 

Grown women don’t need to be patronised about what might keep them in chains by the Government or its National Women’s Council cheerleaders.

It’s not tradwives promoting a domestic ideal. 

It’s the ‘motherhood penalty’, which prevents many women gaining promotion, and feeds into the 70 per cent of Irish mothers of young children longing to spend more time at home rather than being cogs in a wheel.

If the Government is serious about encouraging mothers away from stereotypical roles, ministers should lobby for it. 

But that would mean facing down employer bodies or incurring the hostility of unions and vested interest groups to make the lives of mothers working outside the home easier.

Compared to taxpayer-funded virtue-signalling about a non-existent threat to women’s freedom, that would be a real undertaking.