Ms Catherine Lane:

On instrumentalising the extension of candidate selection quotas to local elections, several options are available. A process would have to be undertaken to develop legislation to address those geographical disparities and to not disadvantage independent candidates. We already spoke about the incentive scheme recently introduced for political parties to support and motivate changes in behaviour in respect of supporting more women to run in the local elections in 2024. I reiterate that we have had previous incentive schemes and voluntary commitments. People will be aware that there was such a voluntary commitment concerning State boards and it took 25 years to come to fruition. That was only the average to achieve a gender balance on State boards.

There may be opportunities in this regard. If it is not practical or if there is no agreement to extend the existing quotas for local elections to general elections, what other mechanisms are at our disposal? We have presented some options in that regard. The possibilities include investment in the political parties and tying that more to sanctions and more robust reporting of how that public money is being used to support the participation of women and other minority groups in political parties. A decent amount of supplementary funding could be made available for having reached a target or quota after the local elections in 2024.

We believe work in this regard must start happening now in order to give the women we hope will be selected in greater numbers in all the different constituencies a real winning chance. Some of the feedback we have had from women candidates referred to them feeling that they were not on a winnable ticket or that they were added too late. That is not doing the women involved any justice or doing our democracy any service. Therefore, there are several options to address the situation and achieve the desired outcome. If it might be helpful, we have written up information in that regard that we could submit to the committee, based on engagement with our members and academics in this area.

Returning to a previous point, we are very concerned not only with the imbalance that continues to persist but also the retention issue for women councillors and younger men, in particular, who have caring responsibilities and who are trying to manage other paid employment as well. We believe that aspect needs serious attention in the run-up to the local elections in 2024 to ensure we do not see the gender representation gap widening even more.