Dr. Michelle Maher:

I manage the SHE programme for Longford Women’s Link. I thank the committee for allowing us to participate remotely today. In doing so, the committee recognises that innovation is required to facilitate women in rural Ireland to contribute to politics.

The 2019 local election results made stark reading for women in rural Ireland. Overall, 24% of county councillors elected were women. This figure is, of course, skewed by the high number of women elected to councils in Dublin and surrounding counties where at least 30% of those elected were women. This picture changes dramatically the further from Dublin you go. Of the 37 county councillors in Donegal, just four are women. In 2019, three women and 15 men were elected to each of Leitrim, Sligo and Roscommon County Councils. In Longford just one woman was elected in 2019.

For ourselves, the arrival of Covid meant moving SHE fully online, meaning women beyond our originally envisaged north-west and midlands region could participate. We are now nationwide with women from all over Ireland joining us. We are joined by women from Mayo, where just two of the 30 county councillors are women, from Monaghan, where there two women in a council of 18 members, and from Kerry, where four out of 33 councillors are women.

SHE supports the citizens’ assembly’s recommendation to extend gender quotas for party candidates at general elections to local elections. As the purpose of SHE is to support women into local politics in rural Ireland, we will limit our contribution today to our area of expertise of local elections and rural Ireland.

Our support for this recommendation is because it complements two areas of our work in rural Ireland, namely, SHESchool and the Women’s Regional Caucus. We do not support quotas only as a method of strengthening a pipeline from local to national politics, although we recognise that many national politicians start their political careers in county councils. We believe that making the pipeline a focus depreciates the valuable work of local government.

The first of our reasons for supporting quotas comes from our free online SHESchool, providing political and election education to women. See Her Elected has written Ireland’s first guidebook to running in the local elections, which is available for free in English and Polish. The guidebook is supported by free online practical workshops. The innovative success of SHE and SHESchool has been recognised at a European level as SHE won the Democracy Innovation in Politics Awards in December 2021. This is the first time this prestigious European award has been won by a project from Ireland.

Our SHESchool workshops are for potential candidates and the women who will support them as part of campaign teams. In November 2021, we had 108 women register for our first foundation workshops. Those who completed the series have now started our practical strategy workshops to put together the nuts and bolts of their campaign strategy. Another 135 women have just commenced our second foundation workshops and are working on getting the groundwork for a local election campaign right.

The second area of the work of SHE that speaks to the citizens’ assembly recommendation is that we are joint secretariat to the Women's Regional Caucus in collaboration with the Association of Irish Local Government. The caucus is a network of 42 women councillors from 13 neighbouring local authorities who have voted by a large majority to support the citizens’ assembly’s recommendation for quotas at local elections.

In an ideal world, gender quotas would not be necessary but in SHE we are dealing with a reality in rural Ireland that requires a sharp acceleration. This is an entrenched reality. Since the formation of the State, only 11 women in total have been elected to Donegal County Council, nine to Clare County Council and six to Leitrim County Council. These statistics are typical across rural Ireland.

Both the SHE programme and the Women’s Regional Caucus are supported by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage under the stewardship of the Minister of State, Deputy Burke. From our strong vantage point at SHE we can see how a policy that supports women in rural Ireland into local politics with SHE’s guidebook and SHESchool workshops and supports a robust network of rural women county councillors in a caucus can be solidly underpinned by the introduction of gender quotas for local elections, and hence our support.