Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Taoiseach for coming today and I apologise for not being here earlier. I was on the Order of Business in the Seanad.

I acknowledge the amount of work that this Government and the previous Government have already done to address what we have been talking about for what feels like generations. Eaten bread is soon forgotten, as they say, and we are concentrating on all of the things that are still left to do. The difficulty I have is that we are literally talking ourselves to death. I do not mean to be disrespectful when I say that but I feel aghast when the Taoiseach says that he is going to set up another little commission to talk about the wording. I was at the Cabinet table when we came to the last wording. When we went out to open consultation this is why that had to be scrapped and why the Government had to establish a commission. We are going around in circles. The list of things that we need to change by law in order to change the culture of Irish society - not political society but Irish society - to make it equal for men and women keeps getting longer. Because those voices are minority voices they always end up at the end of a list. For argument's sake, we talk about gender-proofing budgets yet the automatic enrolment heads of legislation that were published this week continues to perpetuate the gender pension gap that exists for society today. This is a brand new scheme that has been around since Séamus Brennan's days in its making. We announced it this week and it continues to perpetuate the gender pension gap. There are parents of incapacitated children who are born to women and men who are probably in their 20s or 30s. They are abandoned by the State because the woman must give up work to mind her child, and we give the husband a tax credit that is so miserable instead of recognising the value of the care that they give. The contribution to the family and society that such carers give should be rewarded or at least acknowledged by the State. We do not even give them credits for their pensions. They do not exist in the State any more. We talk about valuing care yet we pay carer's allowance as an income support and not as valuing care. It is mostly women who do it. If a husband is lucky enough to earn over the threshold then the carer is expected to just carry on herself and the State does not value the care. We expect the wheels of those families to keep on turning. All of these things perpetuate the culture where we feel that we are always last in the queue. Women, care and family life is always last in the queue. We deserve timelines.

I genuinely believe in the citizens' assembly, which was a group of women and men who came along to establish a report for us on all of the ills they think need to be fixed, and to fix it. We are here now and it is going to take nine months to talk about those ills again. We deserve timelines. It is not acceptable for us to say or for the next Government to say that we will get to these things. I would love to see the referendum happening next year but that is only a tiny part. It is also about all of the other small incremental pieces that go to form the culture of how we value women and value the equality of opportunity between women and men in this country. It might be a hard thing to do but I beg the Taoiseach to put in timelines or to allow us to put timelines in.