Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. It is great to be in the room with such expertise. We will try to get everything we can out of them while they are here.

I want to address the minimum wage and flexible working, which I will come back to, however, Deputy Carroll MacNeill raised the point about politics which I will tease out further. She chaired an excellent session at yesterday's Parliamentary Symposium which was on the issue of gender and participation. Ms Rachel Weston Eschenbacher, the regional policy specialist on political participation and governance for the UN, raised an interesting point. She said that in Malta, if they do not reach a certain level of elected women, ten extra seats will be allocated to be filled by women. This is somewhat similar to the Seanad, where we now have 40% women but we did not get anywhere near that percentage elected through the ordinary process. Nine of the 11 nominees of the Taoiseach were women and that is what made up the difference. I wonder whether there should be a policy instrument to force people to do that. It would be a different way of looking at democracy in order to have better representation. Much legislation has come through the Seanad that specifically addresses some of the issue for women, regarding stalking and character witnesses at rape and sexual assault trials for instance. That is one point I wanted to make as an aside.

I am the chair of the Green Party, one of the roles of which is to find people to run for election. It is often difficult to find women candidates, as Deputy Carroll MacNeill has identified, and it is something we want to do. Some 50% of our elected councillors are women. There is a retention problem. Once women start having children, they find they cannot deal with a full-time job, a part-time job and motherhood. It is quite hard to do. I would love to hear the witnesses' thoughts on retention. Changes to maternity and paternity leave introduced this year will address some of that but they will not address the fundamental fact, which I also raised yesterday, that it is not just about childcare. It is about the fact that we want to spend time with our children. Women, who I am looking for to run for election, want to spend time with their children. They do not want a service to be able to send their child to. The job of a Deputy or a Senator would be much easier if Members did not have to leave their home county and stay in Dublin for the week. It should be framed in terms of it not being about the people who are elected. It is about the people we want to be elected. It is about better participation of the general public in politics. It is not that we are looking for something for those of us who are elected. I am here and I have made those decisions and that is fine. It would be better to frame a referendum in those terms so that our Parliament can be better reflective of society in general.

I refer to the other issue of minimum wage. I believe Dr. Redmond worked with Professor Russell on the impact of increasing the minimum wage on the overall participation within the workforce. We now have an increase to the minimum wage which is the equivalent to €35 per week. If people feel the hours they work allow them to spend more time doing what they want at home so that they can reduce their hours, that is not a bad thing. The point we are trying to get to is not necessarily to have full participation for full hours in the workforce. We are trying to get to a point where people are paid well enough for the work they do so that they can make decisions for their family. One of those decisions may be that they want to spend more time at home or work part time. This relates to a point Professor Russell made in that if we have more flexibility, but that flexibility is taken up by women and not men, we will continue the pay-gap problem. More women taking up flexible work should not be a problem if they are paid well enough for their leave. If women want to spend more time at home, I think that is fine. Should we look at a shorter working week so that everybody could spend more time at home? We have not addressed the issue of a shorter working week as opposed to just the pay. I will stop so that the witnesses can speak.