Denis O'Donovan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is how a question is asked. It was very concise for which I thank the Senator. I have a question on the gender balance and focus. The party to which I belong has a new policy trying to encourage gender balance and I am sure almost all parties have the same idea. There is a practical difficulty. When I was in college there were no females in the engineering class and when I studied law, perhaps a tenth of the class were girls, with three or four of them in a class of 30 males. That has changed naturally and there are now more lady solicitors in Ireland than male solicitors. There are many female engineers and they are commonly working in councils.

Politics, as we know it, is unattractive to people. I come from Cork and I know from more than 25 years involved in politics that at the level of the town council or the county council, it is almost impossible to get women to get involved. It is a practical view. In other words, it is not an exact science. The legal, medical and engineering professions saw scarce female involvement, for various reasons, when I was in college in the early 1970s. There has been an evolution but there has been no natural development like that in Irish politics. It is not an attractive career for many reasons. The quota system can be dangerous as we could end up with people working in politics not because it is their passion rather because they are being pushed into it.

I will finish up this module. There was a kite flown by Senator Mullins at the rear.